Mar 18 2013
It’s a part of my paleo fantasy, it’s a part of my paleo dream
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I know an personal anecdote counts for nothing, but my personal experience was going from the “usual” diet to Atikins improved my health.
And only after I went from Atkins to Paleo I got rid of most of my health problems.
Turns out dairy causes (non-gastrointernal) health problems for me.
And then I tried some things, and I would bet that the problem is dairy pasteurized milk. (Dairy from pasteurized milk causes acne for me, while raw milk dairy does not – tried it several times, did not want to believe it at first.)
It was only the “Paleo” idea that enabled me to identify evolutionary novel foods, and enabled me to specifically remove those and see if it helps.
A plausible hypothesis, some experiments and then a clear result in my case.
So I *know* that removing evolutionary novel foods, and trying to find out if such a removal helps health-wise is a viable approach. Might not work in all cases and surely not for all health problems. But from personal experience I *know* that there are health problems out there that *are* caused by our “modern” diet. And from my case I *know* that most medical doctors are ignorant to this connection. So I have reason to believe that my case is not the only one.
PS: After Paleo I have the impression that some/a few/many doctors are stupid. I told one that many of my health problems went away after I stopped eating dairy. That the inflammation of my skin in the form of acne died down after removing dairy. All she could think of was “But you need the calcium!” Come on, WTF????? Modern doctors are not capable to investigate a connection between health problems and nutrition if you present it on a silver platter, so ingrained is the notation what is and what isn’t healthy food. I’m sure I’m missing the reports that millions of lactose intolerant people die in the world because they don’t get enough calcium – my bad.
PPS: I think the alt/CAM/int/whatever types are wrong in many places, but I think they are right in two things: Embracing Paleo and stopping pharma. Their herbs and some of their stuff are BS (and some are harmful), but nothing compared to the what pharma does and what current mainstream nutritional advise does. I recently read this quote on 1boringoldmen’ blog:
“In Atlanta, there’s a big “natural foods” store in the latter-day-hippie district. We often went there for spices or other hard to locate ingredients. One day I was looking through the Indian spices which were next to the “natural remedies” section. A guy was talking to the lady behind the counter, enumerating symptoms. She had a remedy for everything he brought up. I lingered to see if he would stump her, but he left satisfied with a basket full of potions and herbs. I recall that moment sometimes when I look at all the medications people are on. I don’t know how much herbs help beyond the placebo effect, but I think it’s often safer at that latter-day-hippie district “natural remedies” counter than in some doctor’s offices.”
http://1boringoldman.com/index.php/2013/03/16/a-lot-better-than-that/
Medical science is in dire need of a paradigm shift, and it will not be the alternative types that can facilitate that. But the longer medical science drags it feet, the more the alt med “doctors” will gain. You don’t want that? Clean up your house. Start by considering that *every* paper touching on the subject of nutrition of the last five decades contains half-turths and wrong conclusions. If you think the alt med doctors are the main problem, you’ll fail.
And speaking of testing a hypothesis, my favorite:
http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.e8707
And in case you want an mechanism for this:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/anti-inflammatory-drugs-a-closer-look-at-the-risks/#comment-116329
So you have an mechanism how you can increase inflammation, it makes sense when you ask what is evolutionary novel food (and through these points it is in my maybe not so humble opinion therefore plausible by first principles alone), and you have results of an intervention that agree with that – and everything is at odds what is generally considered to be healthy by all the good doctors.
But who am I lecturing doctors?
TM,
“But who am I lecturing doctors?”
No one.
Your personal experience means nothing on a science and evidence based medical blog.
I have lupus and blog about my condition, and get constant “advice” from people about how a paleo diet, or some other diet, or herbs, or standing on my head in the corner for an hour a day, or whatever would cure my condition.
If I stuck to some “ancient” treatment for lupus instead of the modern drug cocktail my doctors have spent ages carefully balancing, my lupus probably would be cured. Death cures lupus.
Dr. Gorski, you have done Anthropology proud today. I have been waiting for someone to take on the paleo, et al, diets and myths about human evolution. One thing to remember, is that pre-agricultural people ate what they could find. Before modern times, this left them, for the most part, lean, which may have made them healthier (for those who lived to be older, anyway).
The other thing I like to point out is that many old people who are in pretty good shape eat an ordinary diet, although they are inevitably lean, or at least not significantly overweight. Until very recently, the last 30 or so years, you simply never saw fat old people–but maybe that is because they didn’t have scooters to get around.:-)
Great quote on the naturalistic fallacy from Sam Kean’s very charming 2012 book about genetics, The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code:
Didn’t The Violinist’s Thumb also have a bit about how we can observe genetic adaptation to a higher-fat diet in the genes extracted from bones we’ve located? It’s been a few months since I read the book, but my memory was that they have evidence that there was a genetic shift, not shared in our simian cousins, that allowed us to eat large quantities of fat without dying as rapidly from atherosclerosis. The tradeoff is that there are other health risks associated with that gene activating, but it was one profitable for the humans of the time who were transitioning into a more agricultural society. Moreover, I remember them indicating that there was evidence that our ancestors ate such fatty foods, and suffered for it, for hundreds of years before that particular gene become pre-dominant, and now the norm.
@TonyMach:
Frankly, your narrative does prove something, namely that you had a food intolerance that you discovered by the same method suggested by many nutritionists, cutting that item out of your diet and seeing if your condition improves. There are people who have trouble with milk. There are people who have trouble with meat. There are people who have trouble with beans, eggplants, shrimp, peanuts… the particular choice of diet that leads to you realizing that cutting the food out of your diet has very little bearing on your discovery. But congratulations on discovering your allergy. I know that, in my case, it took me some time to realize my own developing lactose intolerance (and longer to figure out that it varied such that sometimes I could drink a reasonable quantity of milk and sometimes not).
Integrative Medicine at the University of Connecticut may be flourishing from nourishing by Federal Funding.
NCCAM grants to U Con over the last ten years totaled $4.4 million for 18 awards. One includes a clinical trial on Yoga.
Eugenie Mielczarek
[...] Interesting: [...]
Ack! You beat me to it – the nutrition grad students are critiquing “Forks over Knives” this month and “Paleo Answer” next month. The book is sitting on my desk but I haven’t read it yet (task for spring break next week).
Bottom line – “FvsK” argues that the meat-free vegan diet is best. Paleo argues that heavy meat and low grain is best. Can they both be right? Of course not!!! Because close scrutiny of both diets reveals something quite different. Both are no more than a gimmick that is wrapped around the core nutritional principles that we professionals have been promoting for years: eat less processed food, eat more whole food, listen to your satiety, eat fewer calories, and learn to cook. Learning to cook and spending time cooking as a powerful method to reduce junk calories and control what actually enters your mouth. And exercise – both diets show or promote lots of exercise but don’t explicitly mention it because of course this would undermine the “specialness” of their dietary gimmick.
But sometimes I want to lock both groups in a room, armed with forks and knives, and see who survives.
I look forward to reading Dr. Gorski’s above dissection of the Paleo nonsense.
A couple things.
Firstly, I’m frustrated because a while back I read an article that suggested people may well have been happier and healthier in the period of time before the development of agriculture as opposed early agricultural civilizations. As I recall, the rational was based on increases of disease due to increased population density (and living in close proximity to livestock) and the social stratification that often came along with larger population and agricultural groups. But I can not find that article…because googling gives me pages and pages* of paleo diet stuff.
Secondly TonyMach “PPS: I think the alt/CAM/int/whatever types are wrong in many places, but I think they are right in two things: Embracing Paleo and stopping pharma. Their herbs and some of their stuff are BS (and some are harmful), but nothing compared to the what pharma does”
What pharma does…like save people’s lives. I’m always amazed how folks are willing to discount the lives of folks with serious disease who are only alive and/or productive today because of the advances of “evil pharma”. Why? because they discovered that a dietary change helped their GI bloating, skin itchiness, runny nose, etc.
Of course, since they are most often NOT the ones with leukemia, lupus, diabetes, thyroid disease, blood clots, bipolar disorder, arthritis, etc, and they don’t have to live (or die) with the risks and and pain of experimenting with diet or “natural” alternatives. So what’s it to them, really?
Urgh, Apologies for the horribly incomplete sentence. Hopefully it get across my point, in spite of it’s deformity.
Very cool of Gorski to use the original version of the lyrics by Meat Riot. Most people only know their later songs.
I’d be interested in your response to this
http://robbwolf.com/2013/03/15/evidence-based-medicine-fraud-double-standards-ignorance/
and in general your thoughts on evolutionary medicine as a discipline.
Like TonyMach I have a positive “paleo” anecdote, but unlike him I grew increasingly skeptical of the movement. I think the positive results I got could have been achieved with a responsible elimination diet. It turns out I, like most people with similar problems, am sensitive to so-called “paleo” foods as well.
I also was initially enthusiastic about people like Terry Wahls, who claims to have cured MS with a paleo diet. Then I read more and realized that MS sometimes goes into spontaneous remission even in people not on a special diet. It’s a shame because this leads dietary bullying and guilt-mongering of people with serious illness. Though I read Wahls is subjecting her diet to some actual studies now, it seems her approach relies heavily on anecdotes and testimonials.
mousethatroared, maybe you are thinking of Jared Diamond’s The Worst Mistake?
@ConspicuousCarl
Bad Company? Because that’s what I thought.
Yep, you could stop your whole comment right there. You’re not a doctor, yet you feel adequate to criticize doctors, based on anecdote. That’s not science, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of confirmation bias involved.
Know what else comes from raw milk? E. coli. Yum!
Evolutionarily novel for who? For what time periods? Humans have covered the planet for at least 14,000 years, Europe and Asia for at least 40,000 and Africa for something close to a million. Founder populations splinter off to form early Europeans, Asians, Amerindians, and within those groups undergo selection pressure for the local diet. Is quiona “evolutionarily novel”? Is corn? Rice? Fermented breads? Cheeses? Nearly every food that humans currently eat is “evolutionarily novel” in that humans have been altering the foods themselves, in addition to experiencing their own selection pressures, rendering your whole assertion rather moot. The primordial ancestor of corn looks nothing like modern corn, a “paleobanana” would be regarded as inedible and unless you’re spending a lot of time chowing down on brains, tongue and marrow, you’re probably not eating anything close to the animal foods you think you are. Humans are diverse omnivores, easily identified as such by dentition and gut, who have used fire for tens of millennia to render food more digestible. As a species we can digest almost anything that’s not pure fibre, as individuals we are more or less unique, and you’re committing the ecological fallacy by extrapolating in either direction. Your approach might be able to identify foods that are more or less harmful to your body, but you have no idea why that is, what causes it, or how your ancestors might have been selected for or against with regards that food. Rather than ascribing cause to “evolutionarily novel foods”, why not simply note what foods do or do not affect you? Your umbrella hypothesis is unsustainable but doubtless self-confirming.
You know most doctors? You must be a busy guy considering there are millions of them.
It’s easy to proclaim yourself an expert on mild, self-limiting conditions, and use that to justify bashing doctors. You have no appreciation for the training doctors get, or the problems they actually deal with. But go ahead, pat yourself on the back for figuring out how to confirm your personal experience then extrapolating that to all of medicine.
Are you sure she didn’t say something along the lines of “make sure you get enough calcium? You are concerned with acne, she’s looking ahead to your long-term bone health.
Doctors are trained to see the long-term implications of your health decisions, not the “solution” you present on a silver platter. And your “solution” may not apply to everyone (in fact, almost certainly does not), and may not even apply to you. But lack fo calcium does indeed lead to death, often in the elderly when it’s almost certainly too late to do anything. Your doctor is attempting to prevent a recognized, long-term health consequence of your dietary choice that she has doubtless seen many times in elderly patients, an implication that is a vague, hazy, far-off implication but one that your current behaviour will strongly influence.
“CAM” is not so unitary to claim that it “embraces paleo”. Many doubtless embrace veganism, or their selective, absurd, endlessly-changing rejection of whatever bugaboo they believe is responsible for all death in all humans du jour. You and CAM both commit the sin of making strikingly widespread recommendations on the basis of poor quality, preliminary or personal data that you somehow feel must solve all health problems for all people. You’re not even sure if your solution works for you, let alone everyone. Real medicine and doctors are cautious, incorporate the best current knowledge and generally try not to make recommendations without strong evidence of benefits. Casual, unfounded recommendations can be quite dangerous – certainly yours could indeed drive up osteoporosis risks (a problem already anticipated given the diets and lifestyles of many young women today), Doc Spock’s recommendation to sleep babies on their stomachs is thought to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of infant deaths due to SIDS. Perhaps you should be a bit humbler in your lavish dispensation of advice.
To translate, “I want my drugs to have no side effects and I want to justify my current lifestyle choices”. Yes, everyone wants drugs to have no side effects, but most also want their drugs to have actual effects. If Big Pharma could sell drugs with only main effects, they would be quite happy to do so. Yes, it would be nice if we could find a diet that tasted good and was perfectly health, as well as easy to stay on and supported by evidence. Sadly, that’s not the case.
The difference being, of course, there is actually evidence to support what comes out of the doctor’s office as doing something. The fact that someone behind a counter in a Whole Foods can give people facile responses doesn’t mean they’re accurate or actually helping improve symptoms. Again, you seem to be impressed by people able to provide cheap, easy solutions, with no real appreciation of how worthless and/or, harmful they might be. Yes, science is slow and imperfect, that doesn’t mean “making shit up” is an appropriate response.
Heh, Ben Goldacre has a point to be made here: anybody claiming to have “the answers” when it comes to nutrition is almost certainly wrong. The data is equivocal, complicated, difficult to gather, flawed, contradictory, and above all, incomplete. Science has to deal with this uncertainty and still produce tentative recommendations that make sense, can easily be followed and don’t result in deaths due to nutrient deficiencies or excesses. These issues are studied by thousands, possibly millions of people who have read the knowledge base built up over the past century or more in great detail who still find themselves uncertain and with acknolwedged limitations.
On the other hand, you have no trouble declaring the entire enterprise flawed, simply because you managed to cure acne by avoiding milk. You’ve no problem making sweeping recommendations, urge against “draging feet” and demand a reinterpretation of decades of scientific literature based on your belief that there is some sort of mythic past in which mythic humans ate mythic plants in some sort of unchanging utopia.
You are frightening in your arrogance.
Has anyone done health studies on modern hunter-gatherers?
I would question this. Many such groups are extraordinarily rigid. While this can be comforting (everyone knows their roles, there are virtually no ambiguities in their interactions), it can also demand things like the sacrifice of wives and servants when the fat guy at the top dies, exile, sanctioning of what we would call domestic abuse and a whole lot more. Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps by Karen Palmer gives you a sense of what it might have been like in this superstition-ridden era (particularly in times of scarcity). Some parts of pre-agricultural life might have been great (you were constantly surrounded by the people you grew up with, raised you or were the parent of), other parts were probably terrible (you were constantly surrounded by the people you grew up with, raised you or were the parent of). From my understanding, hunter-gatherers did tend to be taller, healthier and live longer than agricultural civilizations (note that this is civilizations though, not necessarily individuals), because of things like more varied diets, less repetitive exercise (i.e. a HG spends their day walking, throwing and running, a farmer spends their day bent over, swinging a scythe in one hand while holding a bag in the other – for 16 hours). Cities, farming and sedentarism did have a lot more potential for lethal diseases though, proximity to animals, large populations to circulate through and cycles of lethality did indeed make for much more danger from epidemics.
Certainly modern society has tremendous potential for anomie, suicide, loneliness and impersonal, sourceless frustrations and dissatisfactions. But it also has vaccinations, varied art, food and music, travel and more.
I wonder if you could generalize about any of this.
Tony – Why not wander on over to some blogs devoted to various health problems and spread your message there? I’m sure some of your friends in the “non-HIV AIDS” (that’s CFS to the rest of us) camp would be receptive to your paleo gospel.
Stop polluting this place with your “Doctors are stupid, I know this cos the local patchouli-doused hippy sells herbs that can totes cure ANYTHING!” nonsense.
This is Science Based Medicine, not Wow us with your Woo. Your anecdotes mean nothing. Yesterday I used an Android device running Ice Cream Sandwich when I usually use Jellybean. It’s been snowing ever since, and got heavier when I picked up my old Android 2.3. phone. Does moving down the OS release schedule actually affect the weather?
Maybe I should apply for a grant, after all, look at global warming. The temperature’s increasing as Apple and Microsoft release ever more advanced operating systems! Maybe we could reverse climate change if we all downgraded to the previous version of the OS on our computers.
[...] …according to David Gorsi at Science-Based Medicine. [...]
@ Tony Mach:
I *love* your anecdotal stories…especially this one…
“And only after I went from Atkins to Paleo I got rid of most of my health problems.
Turns out dairy causes (non-gastrointernal) health problems for me.
And then I tried some things, and I would bet that the problem is dairy pasteurized milk. (Dairy from pasteurized milk causes acne for me, while raw milk dairy does not – tried it several times, did not want to believe it at first.)”
Really Tony?
http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2012/06/18/raw-milk-raw-deal/
“…The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) frankly states that “research shows no meaningful difference between the nutrient content of pasteurized and unpasteurized milk”. Science has also shown that most enzymes of concern by advocates are not altered by pasteurization. For those with allergy concerns, medical experts and research agrees that it is the proteins naturally present in milk (both raw and pasteurized) that are the cause of allergic reactions to milk and have no relationship to the pasteurization process. In regards to lactose intolerance, it needs to be understood that lactose intolerance is a genetic error of metabolism that some people are born with, and there is lactose present in both raw and pasteurized milk. So unfortunately for the lactose intolerant, raw milk is not the solution. As for probiotics, milk does not naturally contain probiotics; so if they are detected in the raw milk they are likely from another source such as air exposure or fecal contamination. But the good news is that we as consumers have many, safer options for experiencing the benefits of probiotics, including yogurt with active cultures and over the counter supplements…”
And…
“…Data collected by the CDC from 1998-2009 documented 93 disease outbreaks due to raw milk and raw milk product consumption. These outbreaks caused 1,837 illnesses, 195 hospitalizations, and 2 deaths. It is important to note that for every case that is reported and diagnosed, there are many illnesses that go unreported, which means these case numbers in reality are certain to be much higher. The most recently reported outbreak occurred in Oregon this past April. The outbreak involved 19 people, 15 of which were children, with 4 of the children ending up in the hospital undergoing treatment for kidney failure. Eleven of the cases were confirmed to have been caused by a very dangerous strain of E. coli that was traced back to a dairy farm that supplied the families with raw milk. In reflecting on outbreaks such as these, it is important to remember that these illnesses are preventable. But hopefully, these sad cases will also serve to educate us as consumers, so that we can make informed and healthy choices for ourselves and our families…”
You would do well to check out the CDC website to find out how many cases/outbreaks of salmonella, listeriosis, E.coli and C. jujuni have been reported/associated with the consumption of raw milk and raw milk products:
http://www.cdc.gov/features/rawmilk/
@FulfilledDeer
nevermind
The basic premise behind an ancestral approach to nutrition is to place evolutionarily novel foods under heightened scrutiny, and in particular to eliminate those with plausible pathophysiological mechanisms by which they could lead to the diseases of civilization. It has nothing to do with paleo re-enactment, even though attempts to discredit it keep employing this man of straw.
The fact that genetic adaptations have occurred within the past 10,000 years is also neither here nor there. One million years is the typical time frame that evolutionary biologists give for a species to fully adapt to a novel environmental selection pressure. There will, of course, will be outliers. So what? Furthermore, the time frame for adaptation to occur from a de novo mutation will, on average, be many orders of magnitude different than the time frame for selecting for a gene that already exists (i.e. lactase, ccr5-d variant, etc.). This point has been conveniently left out of these critiques.
Also, the presence of atherosclerosis in the vascular beds is a necessary but insufficient condition for a vascular event. The critical factor, of course, is the presence of an unstable atheroma, which many times occurs in folks with only modest atherosclerotic disease. On the flip side, it is not uncommon to see widespread atherosclerosis on post-mortems in folks who never had a vascular event. And what we’re concerned about here is preventing vascular events, not atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis may may well be an invariable part of the “aging” process, but if it doesn’t lead to vascular events, then who cares? And if we’re trying to test the hypothesis that evolutionarily novel foods protect against unstable atheromas, then looking at atherosclerosis in ancient humans isn’t how you’d do it.
It seems that the authors on this site reflexively dismiss anything that exists outside the mainstream, and then try to marshal an argument to defend that position. This, of course, is no different than a large chunk of the CAM community, who likewise reflexively dismiss anything that comes from the mainstream health community. As a physician and a skeptic, I would like to see you guys hold yourselves to the same standards you’d like the CAM proponents to adopt.
If you do not believe that a species will be best adapted to environmental conditions under which it has been exposed to the longest, then you disagree with the premise behind ancestral nutrition. This is the argument you must make if you wish to discredit it, though it would fly in the face of our mainstream scientific understanding of evolutionary and molecular biology (which I gather is why people keep erecting straw men to critique the paleo movement, as the only other alternative is to defend creationism…).
It’s not really fair that this article is lumping together the paleo diet with people who deny modern pharmaceuticals or push “traditional” medicine. I don’t think there’s anything fad-ish or wrong about making an effort to eat a cleaner diet. I’m still skeptical about eliminating grains entirely for anyone who isn’t gluten-intolerant, but the basic idea of “eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat that hasn’t been factory farmed/pumped full of antibiotics, and avoid highly processed foods like kraft dinner/mcdonalds/margarine/refined sugars, and consume dairy and grains in moderation” isn’t really novel or controversial. That’s pretty much the theory behind primal eating in a nutshell. If you want to go for something controversial, try the ketosis diets, which eliminates almost all carbohydrates. Paleo doesn’t eliminate carbs, it’s not the same as Atkins.
Paleo isn’t the fix all solution for everything, though I’m sure there are many who do view it religiously, just like some people follow a vegan diet religiously or a raw diet religiously. But if it helps a person learn more about how their body processes food, make better decisions, improve their health by losing weight, and makes them healthier, then what’s the problem? I don’t really care about what hunter/gatherer societies ate or what our ideal evolutionary diet is, I care about what modern science says about nutrition and what works for me.
There may not be a one size fits all solution to diet and nutrition, and it’s certainly possible that the science today will be debunked in 30 years, just like today we’re debunking the science from 30 years ago. But accusing paleo eaters of rejecting modern science and medicine is asinine, if anything much of the paleo diet itself is based on modern science (for example the more recent nutritional science suggesting that fats aren’t the antichrist after all). If you want to look at obesity as a problem, rates have continued to rise exponentially despite the nutritional guidelines and increase in carbohydrate consumption and reduced fat products etc in the last few decades – why? Is it so controversial to suggest that maybe the way we’ve been approaching this has been wrong?
WilliamLaurenceUttridge please check the clinical trials regarding acne and milk, and the biochemical mechanisms related to mTOR activation by Leucine.
Aldo do please check the literature or USDA data for calcium content and bioavailability in food by type of calcium (quelate vs inorganic). Elimination or reduction of milk does not imply calcium deficiency.
And a lot of calcium in the diet does not mean healthy bones. There is more to bone health than calcium.
Too much calcium in the diet may even be detrimental regarding atherosclerosis and calcium deposits.
Maybe it is true atherosclerosis is a natural degenerative process, and something else is needed to develop heart disease; pro inflammatory diet maybe? Some populations as the Massai are known from autopsies to develop plaques, but not heart disease.
I agree the paleo movement has contaminated an initially good hypothesis to check on trials, but this does not mean the evolutionary framework is bs; nutrigenomics and nutrigenetics will prove that.
Barry2:
I recently read Mutants : on genetic variety and the human body by Armand Marie Leroi. In the chapter that discusses small people there are mentions of some hunter-gatherer tribes that have been found, and sometimes lost. Among them were some in Burma, which apparently were short due to malnutrition, and others in various countries that suffered from lack of iodine in their diet. So they have been studied, except after being “found” they sometimes stop being pure “hunter-gatherer” societies.
As an evolutionary biologist/vertebrate paleontologist who studies the circumstances surrounding the increase in our hominin ancestors’ intake of meat, I have often viewed the paleo diet fad with (gentle) amusement….particularly the vegan versions. Granted, the recipes are often quite delicious, regardless of how “authentic” they are. If nothing else, the paleo diet is getting people to think about what is going into their food and eventually into their bodies. Unfortunately, most people lack the scientific literacy to see whether what they are replacing it with is any better.
I have not read all of the studies cited in the essay above. However, I have looked at some of the studies on the Egyptian mummies. You have to keep in mind that Egyptian mummies are not necessarily representative of the entire population and may belong to a class (or classes) that had a diet that was different than other members of Egyptian society. They also differed in activity level. Just something to think about. The hunter-gatherer data mentioned above, is, therefore, quite interesting to me as activity level and diet are not as stratified (if at all) in hunter-gatherer cultures. They also had something more (presumably) similar to the pre-agricultural paleodiets that I have seen put forth on various websites.
Finally, to respond to some of the comments above, the idea that there is a specific “time frame” such as a million years to respond to selection pressures misunderstands how evolution works. Species that reproduce more quickly evolve more quickly as they have more generation times in a given period. The tempo of evolution also is dependent on the amount of selective pressure occurring. Finally, it also depends somewhat on the complexity of genetic control of a trait. Many studies (as pointed out above) have shown fairly rapid evolution (few thousand years) occurred within human populations long after we split from other hominins as a species despite our slow reproductive interval. And, of course our species as a whole is much younger than a million years old as shown by both paleontological and genetic studies.
WLU- I would question it too…if I could find out what I read in passing that suggested it. Maybe it was an article or interview about the Jared Diamond book that mgmcewen suggested*. Anyway, it was an interesting idea, although I don’t know how well supported. I guess the thing that intrigued me is that it questions the opposite side of skepticism of modernity, which is the assumption that modernity always improves things. (an assumption which I refute everytime I talk on the phone to someone with a Blackberry).
*thanks mgmcewen! I’ll check that out.
@WLU – Although to be clear, I’m pretty sure there was no comparison of Paleo lifestyle to modern lifestyle. It was just Paleo to early agricultural. Damn selective memory.
jturknett “The basic premise behind an ancestral approach to nutrition is to place evolutionarily novel foods under heightened scrutiny, and in particular to eliminate those with plausible pathophysiological mechanisms by which they could lead to the diseases of civilization.”
Be nice if this “heightened scrutiny” included scientific studies, rather than conjuncture and anecdotes, is all.
*sigh* Guys, I know there are a lot of trolls out here, but if we jump feet-first on every person who says “Hey, this diet works for me. Can you explain why I’m wrong?”, we’re just going to come off as hostile.
Dr. Gorski didn’t have enough information to write this post. It’s a bit of an embarrassment… Hardly science-based. Most of the arguments here are straw-man arguments, combined with a nice slather of the Association Fallacy.
There’s some excellent scientific rationale for the Paleo diet. The fact that Dr. Gorski and Prof. Zuk are ignorant of it doesn’t really reflect on the diet badly.
“Zuk couldn’t resist asking a question, namely why the inability to digest so many common foods would persist in the population, observing, “Surely it would have been selected out of the population.” Cordain’s response? That humans had not had time to adapt to these foods, to which Zuk retorted, “Plenty of time.” ”
As a matter of fact, she’s flat wrong and Cordain is right. The fact that Dr. Gorski includes this as a “telling incident” is telling, but mainly about how little he knows about the topic.
Incidence of Celiac disease is highest in countries where consumption has been going on for the longest.
“The domestication and cultivation of wheat first occurred in the Middle East, in the “fertile crescent” region stretching from modern-day Turkey to Iran.2 The literature has increasingly noted celiac disease in this region, with reports of high prevalence coming from average-risk populations in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait.3–15″
“Celiac Disease”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3264942/
@Duggan – Tony is a repeat offender, both here and on scienceblogs. He’s not saying “Paleo helped me, why is that?”. He’s saying that doctors are idiots who know nothing about diet/nutrition, and that magick leaves and seeds can cure anything, based on overhearing a conversation in a shop. How scientific!
@tuck: Quite frankly, if we’re going to have a duel between sources about evolution, I’m going to tend to trust the assessment of an evolutionary biologist like Zuk before that of an exercise physiologist like Cordain. That doesn’t mean that Zuk couldn’t be wrong, but taking her arguments and weighing them against what I know about evolutionary biology myself from my studies in biochemistry, molecular biology, and evolution, combined with my more recent forays into genomics and epigenetics, my assessment is that Zuk makes a far more compelling case than Cordain does.
Oh, here’s another hint. Your article does not necessarily support your point. Certainly the rapid increase in celiac disease since 1950 would tend to suggest that something new has happened in the last 100 years, which, unlike 10,000 years, is almost certainly too short for evolutionary pressure to produce significant changes in the frequency of alleles related to celiac disease, particularly when the reproductive fitness hit a person with celiac disease takes is probably not that bad. It’s also a case where whatever is going on does appear to be more than just increased awareness leading to more screening and leading to the diagnosis of more subclinical disease or disease diagnosed as something else.
http://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/celiac-disease/news/20090701/celiac-disease-cases-are-on-the-rise
It’s rather a more fringe movement than the Paleo diet, but a similar expose of the Raw Food diet would be consistent with the mandate of this blog. Proponents of raw food insist that cooking kills enzymes important to digestion. So people go to great lengths to eat foods that have not been heated above 115-118F. Strangely, though, the diet doesn’t include raw fish or unpasteurized milk; instead, it’s an extreme version of vegan.
I’ve tried a few of the recipes, and they’re quite tasty, given that you’re using fresh ingredients. But pancreatic enzymes would break down any proteins we consume to constituent amino acids, correct?
Also – if he feels the need to evangelise about the wonders of cave cuisine, and the health benefits thereof, why not do it among people who could benefit? Why not on his own blog?
n=1 means nothing. I’m sure every single person here can think of a weird physical quirk, medical mystery, or odd allergy that is specific to them. Generalising anything based on those singular instances is foolish.
Stimulants put me to sleep and sedatives make me hyperactive. If I can’t sleep then I chug down some coffee. It would be ridiculous of me to tell insomniacs to indulge in some espresso because it really, really works for me.
Science is cold hard facts. Numbers, statistics, observation and analysis. That’s what’s being discussed here.
Woo is like a woolly blanket knitted by a kindly aunt. Warm, cosy, personal. It insulates, blocks out cold, can block out light if you wrap yourself up in it. It’s comforting, but that’s all. It can’t stop cold from existing, or provide protection against being cold in the future.
Woo preys on people who want to feel special, who want a personal approach that tells them “This approach knows everyone is unique, and we base our approach on that”. They feel that science is impersonal and treats everyone as just another person or set of results.
That’s the approach that’s brought transplants, immunotherapy, chemo, neurosurgery, ARVs, etc. that save millions of lives. What results has warmth and fuzziness brought? Give me cold hard data any day. Warm and fuzzy is for the worried well, and the science denialists.
We’ve discussed raw vegan diets on this blog before, actually.
“n=1 means nothing. I’m sure every single person here can think of a weird physical quirk, medical mystery, or odd allergy that is specific to them. Generalising anything based on those singular instances is foolish.”
What?! You mean the fact that my mother smoked 4 packs of cigarettes a day for 60 years and lived to be almost 96 doesn’t prove that smoking is good for you?
@ elburto – Thanks, I thought it was just me who drank coffee to go to sleep
@MTR:
Diamond’s Worst Mistake does indeed sound like an approximation of what you were thinking, though it’s from 1984 and doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of hunter-gatherers either (life expectancy of 26 anyone?). I’d have just as withering a reply to anyone who suggested modernism is unproblematic as well. Chronic stress, anomie, tremendous disparities in wealth, obesity, almost no unambiguously good roles to fall into, bleah. I’d still rather live now than any other time though.
@jturknetton
“Evolutionarily novel” is an absurd statement though – nearly every thing we consume regularly bears almost no resemblance to their ancestor foods from 14,000 years ago when agriculture started. Agriculture involved intensive breeding to increase size, caloric content and nutritional value, resulting in bananas with no seeds, white flesh potatoes and stubby wheat. Further, most of our staple foods don’t come from Africa, the only part of the planet you can really claim to have any sort of evolutionary meaning for all humans. The diseases of civilization are the diseases of our ancestors, who died of infection and horn through the belly before they died of heart attacks. Unless you restrict your diet to teff and kola, you’re eating “evolutionarily novel” food. There’s no reason to believe all the diseases humans die of are somehow caused by diet rather than simple decay over time of the slop-pile of sausage that is the human body.
Yeah, it’s not scientists that are claiming human evolution stopped in some sort of magical Eden. If you’re going to claim science, you don’t get to pick and choose which science. Humans have been evolving since we separated from chimps, and it has continued since. In fact, it almost positively has accelerated over time due to larger numbers of people, selection pressures due to living in cities, modifications to diet and the impacts of trade.
Depends on the selection pressure and population size.
But Paleodieters are known for their adherence to science and complete lack of cherry-picking of the literature? Much of what this done on this site is a criticisms of the lack of evidence for claims.
Fixed it for you, CAM is inherently based on a lack of research base.
What, like asking for evidence of claims?
Again, selection pressure can exert tremendous influences over extraordinarily short periods of time, and is far more relevant than the amount of time an environment has been stable. Punctuated equilibrium.
Assuming a “cleaner” diet means a less processed diet, there’s nothing wrong with it. The criticism is the exaggerated claims made certain foods or diets can maintain perfect health, preventing all morbidity and mortality.
Exactly, but eating that way isn’t the “paleo” diet – or more accurately one of the many choices of paleodiets people claim will solve all human suffering. Conventional advice is that these foods are acceptable in moderation (and I doubt there is evidence for human harms based on factory farming or the levels of antibiotics found in meat since their recommendations would be evidence-based).
So why claim you’re following a paleodiet?
The problem almost certainly isn’t that the wrong recommendations are being made, it’s that the recommendations are not being followed.
Make it N = 3.
WLU – That’s it. the Jared Diamond article – Discover Magazine. I used to get a subscription. Wow, I could have sworn I read that just in the last year or two…or well 26 years ago. Thanks alot, now I can read it again and see what I think.
@Dr. Gorski: “Your article does not necessarily support your point.”
It clearly supports my point. Prof. Zuk claims that we had enough time to adapt to grains. A disease caused by maladaptation to grains is prevalent in the area where grains were first cultivated by humans. Ispo facto, Prof. Zuk is wrong. Going by the old Roman principle, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one, false in all) she probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about in the rest of her critique.
The same holds true for you.
“Oops, I’m wrong” would have been a more appropriate response to my comment than your arrogant attempt to hide the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
But to educate you further, we have clear evidence of maladaptation to grains, including accounts of celiac disease, going back far beyond the last 1950, or the last 100 years.
“Coeliac disease may have an ancient history dating back to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The first clear description was given by Samuel Gee in 1888. He suggested that dietary treatment might be of benefit. In the early 20th century various diets were tried, with some success, but without clear recognition of the toxic components.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18431060
I suggest you do your homework before you opine on this particular topic.
There are a lot of other problems with your post, but this one is so glaring…
Yup, there is evidence, and if TonyMach had lead with “these studies support it” rather than “in my experience”, I would have been a lot more interested. It’s easy to Gish-gallop through claims, I don’t bother to check all of them. Thanks for suggesting the review. Raw milk, another key claim made, doesn’t turn up much related to acne (one German article from 1987 that seems negative, PMID 3327260).
Never claimed it did. My point was that it’s not unusual for a doctor to hear “I’m giving up milk” and immediately ask about calcium. While not the sole source of calcium, milk is a major one in the West. Certainly, if a friend, relative or even stranger said they were giving up milk, calcium would be one of the first things I brought up. If they had a plan for acquiring it from other sources, bully. My point was “but what about calcium” is not evidence of “stupid doctors who don’t understand science”, it’s a very obvious and important question.
Oh yes, I quite agree. However, bone health in part (possibly large part – Angora Rabbit knows more than I) is predicated on having enough calcium among other factors.
Have there been studies comparing diet-sourced calcium versus supplement? I’ve an inkling that the high spikes in nutrient intakes found in vitamins and supplements is part of the reason they are often associated with negative outcomes, and (like so many things in life) the best advice is that found in mainstream medicine – if at all possible, get your calcium from food, as part of a balanced diet that continues throughout the lifespan.
I question whether it’s even an initially good hypothesis. Specific gene mutations and large scale clinical trials are a far better starting point than an ill-thought-out set of preconceptions and assumptions. What point of human history is “paleo”? Does our food in any way bear any resemblance to that eaten by our ancestors? Does it really matter, or is the human gut sufficiently flexible to meet most of our needs through basically any well-balanced diet? We’re flexible omnivores, humans have thrived on anything from Jainist veganism to almost pure carnivorism among the Inuit. Why adopt some extremity, why deprive yourself foods that are delicious and nutritious in moderation (or at least delicious and not harmful once in a while)? Why stop eating chocolate, chips, cakes, bread and rice on some ill-founded diet that doesn’t make sense historically and of necessity can’t be achieved by even a tiny portion of the world now?
Emerging from deep lurk to observe that a number of the above comments seem to assume that intolerance for certain long-consumed foods (e.g., wheat, the intolerance perhaps showing up as celiac disease) should have been bred out of humans over the past 10,000 years.
Why assume this? Unless a trait–e.g., p53 gene mutation, obesity, a major component of the diet leading to disease–unless something like this interferes with reproduction,why would the given trait will disappear in the population? My admittedly limited understanding suggests that as long as you can reproduce, natural selection doesn’t really care whether you’re miserable or well. It cares only whether you leave progeny.
@MLewis
Any good books to recommend? I like popular but I’m willing to try technical!
My reading indicated that mummification was in part derived from natural mummification caused by the intense heat and dryness of the Egyptian desert. I’d love to see scans of those bodies (if any exist, now 5,000+ years gone, not to mention the millions that were ground up for paint, used as fuel and unwrapped at Victorian parties). You’d have mummies that were far closer to actual hunter-gatherers and not those wealthy enough (and far enough removed from hunting and gathering) to be mummified in linen.
Such an enormous confound, particularly compared to modern societies, that it almost renders all other comparisons moot!
@DugganSC
I refuse to give up my hobby
@Tuck
I’m going to go with the paleontologist on this one. Considering they can show effective speciation in as little as five generations (even a single generation for plants), the roughly 700 generations since the development of agriculture (10,000 years/15 years per generation) is genuinely “plenty of time”, particularly given sexual reassortment of genes.
If we’re trading aphorisms, “a stopped clock is right twice per day”. The only way you can know which of her facts are true and which are false is to investigate each one individually. Tuck’s point about celiac disease, while interesting, is also not yet substantiated. Changes in humans is one issue, changes in wheat types is another. Foods and environments were not static during human evolution. Wheat underwent a revolution not too long ago with the development of short wheat stalks, hard wheats, winter wheats, bread wheats, cake and pastry wheats, etc. Again, each hypothesis must be examined separately and exhaustively. That is science.
Truly interesting will be the impact of genomics and proteomics in the coming years, the ability to do a quick and simple blood test and have it profoundly inform your individual health.
What a fun time to live!
Indeed, I’d go with the paleontologist and the evolutionary biologist on this one. Even if we estimate 25 years per generation, it’s still been 400 generations since the advent of agriculture. Either way, Tuck seems rather confused. According to the research I cited, the prevalence of celiac disease in 1950 as estimated in the serum samples tested was around 0.2%. In a mere 60 years, the prevalence of biochemically diagnosed celiac disease quadrupled or more. That’s a mere 2-3 generations. Here’s another hint: 0.2% (or even 1%) is not that high an incidence.
And then there’s the evident Big Myth here: that Paleolithic humans were hunter-gatherers. In fact, hunting seems to have been a relatively late innovation. As far as anyone can tell, early humans were primarily scavengers when it came to sources of meat. Unless you’re prepared to go out and scrape up some tasty roadkill for yourself, beating off the crows and other carrion beasts and doing your best to get to the meat before it starts to rot, you’re not really paleo.
There’s at least some evidence for humans scavenging megafauna. We even can trace technological or societal advances at the time by identifying when the scavenging occurred. Earlier scavenging leaves signs of tool marks left on top of tooth marks, which tell us that the humans got to the carcass after other scavengers or predators were done with it. Later scavenging shows the tool marks below the tooth marks, showing that humans had advanced to the point where they were able to get to the carcass before others, or perhaps even managed to drive them off.
I haven’t read this anywhere, but it seems to me that the natural consequence for a paleo diet is that you’re supposed to occasionally GORGE yourself on meat, perhaps monthly, and live on foraged fruits and grains the rest of the time. After all, if you’re butchering megafauna but have no technology for preserving meat long-term — and you’re on a nice, warm savannah where meat will start to rot pretty quickly — you had better eat it fast.
My paleo diet:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-gave-us-civilization.html?_r=0
The funny thing is that celiac disease might not at all because we aren’t “evolved to deal with agriculture” but because we are.
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/presentations/sams-celiac-2012.html
A trade-off between HLA’s adapted to deal with pathogen-rich agrarian environments that some contexts causes the body’s immune system to go postal on itself. It’s populations from the Fertile Crescent origins that seem to suffer from it, plenty of foraging cultures consume traded wheat without a problem
I’ve been a longtime lurker of this site but have never posted. It seems that there are so many confounding factors when discussing diets that it makes almost any dogmatic conclusion hard to support, especially when we are talking about the health of ancestors for which we don’t have much data. My impression of paleolithic life is that it was fraught with hazard, starvation was fairly common at certain times of the year, people died fairly young and infant and childbirth mortality was probably quite high. I suspect coronary disease was probably not a major cause of death because people died early of something else. Is there very good evidence that paleolithic people were so healthy? I know some Cro-Magnon skeletons have been on robust and tall people but do we have enough of a population size of fossils to generalize from this? I also suspect that the diet of a paleolithic person in the Rift Valley was quite unlike that of one in Siberia.
The highly touted Tarahumara people have an average lifespan of less than 50, admittedly skewed by high infant mortality, a fact somehow missing from the book “Born to Run”. It is also interesting to me that Kennebec man had a spearpoint in his hip and the Ice Man died of an arrow wound. The fossil record of Neaderthal people suggests much trauma with a fracture profile that coincides with that of rodeo riders. Some Neanderthal and homo erectus remains from China show evidence of butchery, although the meat might have been scavenged after the owner died of a hyena or some other predator. Tough lives.
In my youth I was enamored of trying to get meals off the land and ate a considerable amount of cattail roots and shoots, spring beauty culms, wild onions, bullfrogs, fish and snails and almost anything that was semi-edible and not poisonous according to the wild edible plant guides I had, although I drew the line at eating stinging nettle, even boiled. I even made the mistake of trying to eat a snapping turtle once, and am convinced that the energy spent in getting the meat out of the shell exceeded the caloric content. I’ve felt guilty for eating that poor turtle ever since. Milk, even raw milk, was of course not on the list. It took a lot of work to get a meal even in the summer when edible plants were plentiful and I got a real appreciation for grocery stores from that particular hobby. Even the ancient native peoples where I grew up learned to augment their diet with beans, corn, squash and pumpkin. Now I realize my ancestors were a lot better than I at foraging and hunting but I still bet they weren’t very fat just because of the work involved in getting the day’s dinner.
A few points about the modern era: One, the socioeconomic status of an individual is very closely correlated with their longevity. It probably was ni the past, too. Two, associated with the rise in obesity is the increase in portion sizes. When I grew up 60 some years ago a soft drink was 6 ounces. A serving of meat truly was the size of a deck of cards and a serving of mashed potatoes was the size of an egg. Not any more. Third, some recent evidence has come out suggesting that having a few extra pounds isn’t necessarily bad for longevity (disclaimer, my BMI is about 20). Finally, most doctors advise a varied diet with a strong emphasis on a lot of different fruits and vegetables, easy on the processed grains and sugar, easy on the animal fat and constraint on the portion size. Pretty much what your mother tells you when you’re four years old. This advice doesn’t sound “stupid” to me.
What people actually eat is a different matter.
Anyway, thanks for all the discussion.
Welcome lurker Dave S. You would have got on well with my granddad. He was an escapee from Auschwitz, and spent months travelling stealthily on foot and eating off the land.
As a kid I really was shown the value of food shops, and the resilience of the human digestive system. Stones, twigs, berries, leaves, rats, bark, hay and even earth.
Some gave a feeling of fullness, others a tiny amount of nourishment. Even until his death he’d eat any food prepared for him, and didn’t care if food had passed it’s use by date, because “Anything is better than nothing at all”
@the coffee cohort – n=3 is now clinically significant. Doctors – please start prescribing amphetamines to insomniacs, on the basis that stimulants=sleeps for at least 3 SBMers.
I wrote about the paleo diet a couple years ago at Skeptoid
http://skeptoid.com/blog/2011/09/05/using-skeptoid-as-a-reference-is-not-so-easy/
I tried to explain how avoiding gluten and eating a paleo diet is probably overall more healthy because you are being more conscious of what you eat, and I would venture to guess eating less calories. Apparently, those who vehemently support the paleo diet felt my conclusion didn’t go far enough to explain how “wonderful” the diet really is. I couldn’t really find any harm in the paleo diet, and in fact I see it as one possibility for helping people to eat better. Why they try to use pseudoscience to sell it baffles me, when the actual science would say it is a pretty good diet overall.
I do get a kick out of the name “paleo.” When I see someone posing about their “paleo” brownies – I wonder how the cavemen were able to aquire square baking pans and Dutch-processed cocoa powder.
“n=3″
I wish I could make it n=4 but alas no. I drink one caffeinated coffee by mistake at night and I’m still looking at the ceiling at 4 o’clock in the morning. If I drink two in the morning, I feel like running a mile at full speed. Three cups and I’m hallucinating.
I love coffee, but it’s so hard to get a good decaffeinated bean for my coffee machine.
@Lytrigian
I’m just finishing Dragon Bone Hill by Russell Ciochon and Noel Boaz, and they confirm your point exactly (albeit for H. erectus). Humans were initially scavengers.
@Dave S
I also just finished The First North Americans by Brian Fagan, that along with some other background reading suggests that starvation was sometimes common – it depended on the population density. Moving into a new environment, given some time to adapt, starvation was quite uncommon. However, as people learned the land, foods and animals, their populations would climb and some form of domestication would appear. Calorie intakes would drop, numbers would continue to expand, deficiencies start appearing and the overall health of populations would decrease (often accompanied by some fascinating evidence of increasing social complexity like massive dirt mounds, human sacrifice and elaborate grave goods). Low-density hunter-gatherers normally starve infrequently, from what I can tell, and end up becoming victims of their own success. Unless they want to perform regular infanticide, they eventually end up doing rather poorly. The key factor seems to be the diminishing returns of foods – some food you can acquire more of by putting in more labour (i.e. farming is one, hunting isn’t because there’s a limit to how far you can walk in a day). Elaborations of cultivation (again, farming), collection (weirs to capture fish, developing processing technology to turn acorns into food), storage (lined pits and pottery for when you’ve had a good year) and fishing (larger boats, more sophisticated harpoons, floats and trips further out into the ocean to capture whales as one example) appear – considerably more work but generally, over the short term (i.e. a century or so) quite successful at meeting nutritional needs. But again, eventually you reach saturation, then deprivation. Hunter-gatherers apparently can not, for the most part, make comparable changes, at best they can move to a new location. If your surroundings are already populated, you’re boned. Farming seems to be a highly successful strategy both in terms of feeding a more concentrated population, and in terms of trapping people once you reach the land’s carrying capacity.
In an interesting aside, in the 80s when Ethiopia was the focus of much attention because of famine, some intrepid camera crew investigated how the local hunter-gatherers were doing. Their response was “what famine?” because apparently they had merely switched from one source of calories (probably a tastier one) to another (less tasty, but readily available). They lived in the Ethiopian outback, with no competition from outside groups, making it relatively easy to move to new locations and switch to new foods. A similar response wasn’t available to the farming-dependent cities.
@WLU – ^^ Two thumbs up on those observations, very insightful.
as an aside…is it bad netiquette to read a comment addressed to someone else, or respond to it? Is it like eavesdropping, then butting in on the conversation? I never know, but I hope it’s not, cause then I would have had to pretend I didn’t read that excellent comment.
Given my complete lack of manners and obvious penchant for criticism of others, I’m probably the wrong person to ask. Given the venue, my feeling would be pretty much anything is fair game and reasonable comment cannot help but add to the conversation.
@mousethatroared: It’s a public forum. Anything and everything posted by anyone and everyone is fair game. If a person wants private discussion, I’d suggest that he use e-mail or instant messaging of some sort.
@wxrocks
Your brownie comment reminds me of my amusement at ‘paleo bread’.
WLU and DG- Oh, what a relief.
Ah. I had not realized that guy was a recurring example. As it was, it seemed like we were falling into the same trap of arrogance as the CAM crowd, loudly proclaiming how wrongheaded everyone else was and putting up a front of not listening in the slightest.
@Billy Joe:
In Dec I bought 25 lbs of dark roast decaf from Coffee Bean Direct for just under $200 US including shipping. I think I have enough to hold me till the middle of April or so. They usually ship within 24 hours and it arrives fast (NJ to NY is quick! ;-> ) They sell many other varieties, including some that are nearly decaf by nature, but I am cheap and like strong tasting coffee so that’s what I get… even if it’s ersatz stuffing kicked out poison as my dad used to say (even the word decaf usually got a hiss from him)
“Certainly the rapid increase in celiac disease since 1950 would tend to suggest that something new has happened in the last 100 years”
Well, yes, something new has happened. 50 years ago, wheat had a gluten content of about 5%; today, it’s more like 50%. That’s just one component. I’m sure there are numerous other differences due to things like hybridization and gene manipulation, which are assumed to be harmless but we don’t really know. The wheat you’re eating today isn’t the same as it was back then.
Paleo deserves credit for people getting started with omega 3s/ fish oils, which I thought was scientifically proven at this point?
Looking at paleo culture and marketing as whole and giving supporting evidence that it appeals to people’s emotional side is easy. Dismissing all dietary aspects of it looks too much like faith based arguing on the other end. Unless the assumption is that the current information about best practices, that people actually follow is, is complete.
And how do studies deal with things like infant mortality rates and starvation? I mean, I’d be dead if not for an incubator and science is now showing that has lasting implications. The data seems entirely too befuddled to draw any conclusions from.
Atherosclerosis is a response to stress and repairing damage. I say, let’s expand beyond food (and cigarettes!). I suspect it’s really missing the forest for the trees.
My minor “trolls”: you can find scientific “evidence” that white sugar doesn’t lead to heath problems and there are examples of synthetic vitamins, minerals and nutrients that at first were thought to be equivalent to the natural counter part, but were then found to be inferior or dangerous.
I prefer to be skeptical overall instead of “this vs that”.
I’ll agree with this to a certain extent, but will repeat my earlier statements about the human gut – for the most part it’s pretty good about breaking down macronutrients into individual molecules.
There’s also not a whole lot of reason to assume that changes to the food we eat is somehow making it more harmful. In addition to an extremely flexible gut capable of digesting nearly anything but raw cellulose, the intensive breeding undertaken by humans over thousands of years have for the most part resulted in more nutritious, less harmful products. The fact that we’re now using manipulation of individual genes instead of crossbreeding is in many ways very useful and allows greater control over the changes made. The assumption that these changes are harmless ignores much of the safety testing that goes into crop modification (particularly for GMO crops), safety testing that arguably would be much better used on crops produced by hybridization.
I’d give credit to the scientists on this one, not the paleos. Confirmation bias is rife in situations like these – the fact that one hypothesis was tested and found to be (to a certain extent) accurate doesn’t justify the entire approach. Generally it’s the other way ’round – pseudoscientists and sCAMsters will take an isolated bit of data like bench research and turn it into an exagerrated benefit that is universally beneficial and supports all of their contentions. No, credit goes towards those who undertake repeated testing that slowly but steadily accumulates into recommendations, not those who combine Gish-galloping with cold reading (making a lot of claims, ignoring the wrong ones and trumpeting the right ones).
What I do is point out that paleo is either redundant to conventional dietary advice (don’t eat a lot of processed things, do eat lots of fruits and vegetables) or unproven (eat lots of meat). No dietician or doctor thinks that current advice is complete, merely that there reasonable is evidence to support its lack of harms in humans. The expectation is that advice will change over time as more evidence accumulates.
Um…white sugar in moderation doesn’t lead to health problems. No mainstream advice consists of “drink a lot of pop and the occasional tablespoonful of sugar”.
I’d be interested in seeing the whole “natural” versus “artificial” micronutrients discussion, but I’ll also point out that most doctors recommend most people get their vitamins from food, not pills.
“The assumption that these changes are harmless ignores much of the safety testing that goes into crop modification (particularly for GMO crops)”
The safety testing for GMO crops is a joke. The “research” is completely controlled by Monsanto, to the extent that it’s ILLEGAL for any independent lab to obtain and use Monsanto seeds for the purpose of independent testing. So there is virtually no independent testing. Monsanto – these are the people who gave us Agent Orange, an ingredient of which they now want to put in the herbicides for GM crops to kill the superweeds that are running rampant over the land due to GM farming.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/06/debunking-the-health-claims-of-genetically-modified-foods/258665/
@WLU:
“… the intensive breeding undertaken by humans over thousands of years have for the most part resulted in more nutritious, less harmful products”
While I do not believe that our crops are actively harmful, whether modified through agriculture or gene manipulation, there’s a niggling part of me that’s whispering of stories of people who’ve gotten ahold of “the pure stuff” when using drugs. More efficacious is not always good, and I think it’s possible that some people may have issues with today’s food due to higher levels. Let’s say that we engineer cashews to have higher iron levels. That’s good for most of us, but someone with hemochromatosis starts running a higher risk, probably not from cashew nuts themselves, but possibly because they don’t realize that their multivitamin is also boosting their iron levels and they go on a nut binge. Odds are, the gradual improvement of nutrition isn’t going to cause issues in the majority of the population, but a Devil’s Advocate position is that it may be affecting some rare cases.
Unfortunately, CAM is all about Special Snowflake Syndrome, so the majority of people are easily convinced that they’re among that minority, kind of a bizarre Lake Woebegone effect.
DugganSC – “As it was, it seemed like we were falling into the same trap of arrogance as the CAM crowd, loudly proclaiming how wrongheaded everyone else was and putting up a front of not listening in the slightest.”
I generally have no problem with folks who like to talk about whatever diet did good stuff for them. It’s those who actively sow distrust of doctors and prescription drugs with little or no evidence that get me riled.
Many people depend upon medications and the medical field to keep them alive or functional. (Like the commentor above with Lupus) There is NO safe alternative, yet they constantly have to deal with people who try to talk them out of taking their medications and try an “alternative” approach. The implication is always ‘If your not willing to try an alternative, then you don’t REALLY want to get rid of your condition.’
Not only are these recommendations unsafe, it is an undue social burden and isolating for folks who already have enough to cope with.
Does anyone have a reference on stanmrak’s claim that gluten content in wheat has increased from 5% to 50% in the last half decade? It seems peculiar to me, but I’ve seen it claimed often by somewhat questionable sources and am wondering if the claim has any basis. I was under the impression that breeding and gene modification has been mostly focused on getting them to grow faster, produce more, tolerate pesticides, tolerate drought, and tolerate mechanical harvesting better. I could see breeders working to increase the level of starch in their product, but why the gluten part, and why so dramatically? Wouldn’t it screw up bread recipes if the gluten content changed that dramatically? And really, if it’s half gluten, wouldn’t it have dramatically lower caloric content? While we’re at it, does anybody know what part of the grain is being measured here? 50% of what — the entire grain, the endosperm, the germ, what?
“Wouldn’t it screw up bread recipes if the gluten content changed that dramatically?” Seems like it would mess with recipes. I was told by a artisan bread hobbiest that bread flour is supposed to be higher in gluten (don’t know how much) that it gives bread that chewy and crusty texture.
Not just bread. Virtually anything made with flour would be affected to varying extents.
Talking about “the gluten content” is to some extent a misnomer since wheat doesn’t really contain gluten to begin with. It contains gliadin and glutenin. These combine to form gluten when the flour is worked in the presence of water. Flours are more precisely classified according to their protein content, which indicates how much gluten will be formed when the dough is worked.
A 2% difference in protein content makes a major difference to the outcome; tenfold would completely wreck any recipe.
Oh, and just to be clear… century-old bread recipes work acceptably with modern flours, which they would not if the gluten production varied by a fraction of that amount. It is flat-out false that the gluten produced by modern flours is 10x that produced by flours fifty years ago. I suppose there might be some weasel-wording which might allow one to slip out of this, but only by completely abandoning the supposed implication.
I would urge folks to read Paul Jaminet’s critique of paleofantasy here:
http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2013/03/paleofantasy-and-the-state-of-ancestral-science/
There seem to be some pretty fundamental misconceptions about the “paleo”, or ancestral health, movement evidenced in the original blog post and in the comments here. Part of this may stem from the fact that, because it still exists outside the health mainstream, it attracts some of the woo contingency. Another may be because folks equate it with Loren Cordain’s original incarnation of The Paleo Diet, which was flawed in many ways — current thinking in the community differs a great deal from Cordain’s initial views. Good science evolves, which is what has happened (and will continue to happen) in the ancestral health community. It is at its core a community of scientists, after all (which is why its so puzzling to see folks equate it with other anti-scientific endeavors…).
Thanks, folks; that’s what I was thinking that “50% gluten” was a ridiculous claim. I’d love to hear stanmrak say where he heard it, though, because I’ve seen it claimed so often as some sort of received truth but without any citation.
mousethatroared — I make my own bread, but wouldn’t describe myself as an artisan.
Just somebody who enjoys kneading! (Great stress relief!) Bread flour is indeed more glutinous, with a definite affect on what you make with it. But I make pies and cakes more often, and increasing gluten would be devastating on those. The technique for making flaking pie crust revolves heavily around preventing too much gluten from forming. Do not overwork the flour; there will be no going back.
Scott — “Talking about “the gluten content” is to some extent a misnomer since wheat doesn’t really contain gluten to begin with. It contains gliadin and glutenin.” True, though from a celiac perspective (which is usually where this claim is made), this isn’t important as gliadin is actually the main offender. Wheat eaten whole versus kneaded bread, it’ll have the same effect on the gut of a celiac sufferer.
Nope, most objections to GMO are the joke. There’s no real reason to think that the crops aren’t safe, there’s no good evidence the crops are unsafe, and people already consume large amounts of GMO corn, soy and papaya. The benefits are tremendous (more nutritious food, lower viral loads in papayas, fewer fertilizers and pesticides needed, better drought and flood tolerance, and perhaps eventually taste!), and most of the objections aren’t scientific or technical – they’re knee-jerk reactions to Big Business controlling the technology. GM farming would generally require fewer chemical pesticides by the way. You should read some real science.
Agent Orange is an incredibly effective defoliant. The fact that it was used in Vietnam is a fact to blame the government at the time for, Monsanto was meeting a demand. They don’t want to cause birth defects or permanent damage to any rain forests. Corporations are greedy, not evil. If you’re so strongly opposed to all this, don’t blame the company – blame the regulators. Write a letter to your congressperson, not an uninformed comment in a blog.
I don’t know about stanmarak, but http://www.thenaturalrecoveryplan.com/articles/What-Happened-to-Wheat.html claims a 500-fold increase, which is even more ridiculous. Maybe people are confusing “500% increase” (i.e. six time the original level) with “500 times the original level”?
I find it amusing when I am on pinterest and certain recipes come up,
Paleo friendly: Peanut butter patties, girl scout cookie thin mint recipe, raw honey strawberry scones, chocolate cupcakes (I had no idea people of the past ate like this!?!)
or gluten free: triple chocolate chip cookies, chocolate almond joys, coconut cupcakes with key lime frosting
I understand that there are people that have been diagnosed with celiac disease or diagnosed with an allergy and truly need to avoid gluten, but I have several friends that believe the ‘gluten’ is causing their weight and health problems that have no such diagnosis. According to some of these recipes….yes, I can see why the ‘gluten’ is so problematic!
Calli Arcale – In my mind anyone who has the patience to deal with growing sourdough starter is an artisan. But this is coming from someone who handed the handling of guppies tank over to my husband because I couldn’t deal with the chemistry. I am an uncomplicated* person. My favorite bread is the no knead kind, not because I don’t like kneading, but because I like the idea that you can mix it, let it sit, bake it and it’s yummy. I do make a damn awesome pie crust, though, and I agree – minimum handling, cold tools, ice water are the keys to success.
WLU – While I completely agree that the health concerns of GMO are unfounded, I would not be so quick to dismiss the business concerns. In my mind, corporate interests in monopolizing any market (in this case seed) are inherently at odds with what I have heard are good food security practices (diversity of species and the like). It seems to me this aspect of GMO’s should be monitored with care. Of course, what I know about farming would fit inside my (now empty) fish tank.
*otherwise know as simple
The problem, of course, is that the reflexive, woo-tending anti-GMO types conflate health concerns with business and ecological concerns.
I suppose if one had a massive crop failure due to a GMO monopoly (speculation) that could result in health concerns, such as starvation, in vulnerable areas.
But those don’t seem to be the kind of health concerns that most of the anti-GMO folks I’ve heard are talking about…it’s all cancer, allergies and the like for unspecified reasons.
No, but will you settle for a reference that tanks it?
I would counter with two points:
- your statements above can be assessed and monitored empirically, so in the rare cases of increased dose plus increased vulnerability, you can inform and monitor intelligently (plus, my inkling is that even very high dose foods are unlikely to approach the dosage level, concentration and metabolism of vitamins – though there is precedence in the form of carnivore liver and vitamin A)
- those possible, potential harms are worth noting, but there are genuine, real harms that can unquestionably be offset through the use of GMO and cross-bred crops (golden rice can genuinely and unquestionably prevent the most common form of childhood blindness; short-stalk wheat prevents famine; GMO papaya prevented the extinction of the papaya); in this case it is the precautionary principles possible harms versus science’s proven ability to meet genuine needs
That’s why I think we should be ruled by councils of scientific technocrats who control our lives with an iron fist
Re:gluten and bread, there is already the option to buy high, moderate and low-gluten flours. The first is best for bread (known as bread flour in fact), the last produces tender cakes and pastries and the middle is good for most things and can often be substituted for the other two generally without modification. High gluten flour would even have an advantage in providing a scarcer and more nutritionally valuable protein versus the high-calorie but less useful carbohydrate. Cooks Illustrated makes a point of specifying and testing baking recipes on the basis of flour type, one of the reasons it is the BEST RECIPE SOURCE EVAR, FHTAGN!!!!
MTR, have you seen the CI almost no-knead bread, made with beer? I’ve made it dozens of times, it’s excellent bread, I get a lot of compliments. Modifies Lahey’s bread slightly to boost the flavour.
I’m not quick to dismiss business concerns, merely pointing out that they mostly aren’t scientific issues. Scientifically, there’s no real reason to reject GMO, both on an aggregate level as an approach to growing food, or on any specific level I’ve ever seen. GMO can also help with food security and genetic diversity by reducing the amount of land needed to grow crops, thus expanding uncultivated land that can revert to wild scrub, forest or grasslands. China grows massive amounts of GMO cotton, and has reduced its use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides as a result – a tremendous boon in many, many ways. And the reduction isn’t minor, IIRC it’s something like two orders of magnitude, a 100-fold decrease. Tomorrow’s Table by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak (the former a GMO rice researcher, the latter an organic farmer, and married to each other) was an excellent starting point. For the science of GMO, the organic section was pretty terrible and they show the distressing Californian tendency towards woo, giving birth in a bathtub in their backyard. Which illustrates how compartmentalized people’s thinking can be. The book goes into some of the real issues with GMO, the cost associated with developing them, patents, freedom of information and the like. It’s a good book, very readable, I think you would find it interesting and well-within the complexity understandable by a layperson. I’ve relatively minimal understanding of GMO and farming and grasped it without having to re-read more than a couple pages.
You can skip the organic farming chapters in my opinion, poorly justified, old, inadequate research base, long on rhetoric.
Calli Arcale:
Oh, great just as I get to bottom I see WLU saying:
For puff pastry which has to be folded several times to get the layers, there is low gluten pastry flour. I do have a box of cake flour, which is a low gluten flour, for cakes. Though I do use regular flour for pie crust and biscuits. I am just careful about how they are handled.
For pizza dough I also use regular flour, and really work up the gluten. It makes it so I can roll it out very thin, and get a nice crust on the pizza stone.
WLU “I’m not quick to dismiss business concerns, merely pointing out that they mostly aren’t scientific issues.”
ehhhh? Not quite sure that I’m completely willing to put market pressures on agriculture outside scientific issues…so perhaps we will agree to disagree on that part while agreeing on the majority of issues. Sounds like an interesting book. Although, I admit the commentors on SBM give me far more reading material than I will ever get too.
Thanks for the bread recipe, I was just thinking of mixing up some bread tonight.
Christ commented on gluten in pizza dough – My pizza dough recipe bread flour with some semolina – http://www.fabulousfoods.com/recipes/cheri-s-favorite-pizza-dough. It’s not a thin crispy pizza. It’s rather yeasty, bubbly, thick with a nice chewiness to it.
The business issues with companies like Monsanto have not so much to do with biotechnology as they do with old-fashioned business practices of buying out competitors to gain market share.
There are many pizzas in this world. We all get to find the one we like. As it goes, daughter likes the “cheese bread” that is a thin pizza dough sprinkled with olive oil, mozzarella, garlic and Parmesan. And the newest version with has olive oil, mozzarella, Parmesan, goat cheese, fresh sage and speck (smoked prosciutto), which is a variation of the sage butter pasta in The Herbfarm Cookbook).
Perhaps a paleo version would be a thin slab of meat with veggies and herbs on top. Hold the crust and the cheese.
I have worked with both modern and “ancient” flours. The latter do sometimes not work very well in modern recipes, but they are not impossible, they just require more skill to work with, which is a huge annoyance if you own a restaurant or bakery.
Thinking celiac disease means we didn’t evolve to eat gluten is like thinking tick-bite induced meat allergy means we didn’t evolve to eat meat. It’s an autoimmune disorder that some people are vulnerable too, but the major HLA associated with it is mainly associated with agricultural populations so it seems it is some kind of trade-off evolutionarily. It might have only become an issue recently, since the vast majority of people with the vulnerable HLAs don’t have it, and it seems to need something beyond wheat to activate it. It reminds me a bit of hemochromatosis in that way…which I’ve seen vegans use to argue we aren’t mean to eat meat, which is equally ridiculous.
Great points about the naturalistic and other fallacies. It’s tempting to re-imagine any past to confirm one’s own current biases.
In part of your post, you rightly acknowledge that the Horus study is a small sample (especially for hunter-gatherers), but then write “…certainly atherosclerosis was common even among hunter-gatherers” based on only 3 out of 5 hunter-gatherer mummies. I’m curious if you had others studies in mind that corroborated that this was really common among such a sub-population?
There’s a detailed reference to a study that used a larger sample size of skeletons of hunter-gatherers (n=285) and agriculturalist (n=296) that lived in roughly the same geographic area but were separated by about 4,000 years. In this sample, the non-HG group was noticeably unhealthier compared to the HG skeletons. (See http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/nutrition-and-health-in-agriculturalists-and-hunter-gatherers/) Although it’s still just a relatively small sample size (though larger than 5 or even 137), it lends some support to the paleo fantasy that perhaps what we suffer from are “diseases of civilization”?
I’m still reading Zuk’s book on my e-reader, but so far I’m not finding any references that contradict the notion that hunter-gatherers suffered such “diseases of civilization” approximating the magnitude (i.e. not to say our ancestors suffered from NO diseases at all) we suffer from them today–though of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially with these kinds of studies.
@ Calli and any other bakers on here:
If you substitute vodka (the cheap rotgut stuff) for some of the water in a pie dough recipe, you get a dough that rolls out like play-do and is very forgiving–as in make a mistake, you can wad it all up and roll out again with no impact on flakiness or tenderness. The alcohol content of the vodka inhibits some of the gluten formation and since vodka is not all water, you can have more liquid without the bad effects of water on the dough.
Also, different brands of flour have different protein contents within types of bread. King Arthur all purpose flour has a higher protein content than some of the other main brand all purpose flours, for example.
While I agree it’s undesirable to recommend ultra-detailed regimens like the Paleo diet based on unsubstantiated theories, it’s possible to err in the direction of overly dismissing potentially viable concepts as you have in this article.
First, by definition the Paleolithic period ended 10,000 years ago. Therefore your evidence of artherosclerosis in more recent populations is irrelevant. If you want to dismiss Cordain’s argument in the way you have here, you’ll have to find evidence of this disease process happening readily before 10,000 years ago, in populations that didn’t eat grains or dairy. Your more recent examples are all of people who ate grains. Also, evidence of artherosclerosis in older individuals is irrelevant, as few people lived to be 35 let alone 50 in the Paleolithic era. Really nothing about the Paleolithic diet or way of life can be extrapolated to apply to the health of individuals over 50.
The problem here is not so much the naturalistic fallacy, though that is a problem. It’s that concepts like the Paleolithic diet encompass many ideas, some of which are valid and some of which are not. There are ideas worth investigating, such as the potential negative impact of certain factors associated with modern life on the body (e.g., refined sugar, sedentary, diets low in fiber and high in fat or protein). It’s entirely possible that, while we are capable of eating grains (only some humans can eat dairy), they provide less than optimal nutrition because they come packaged by nature with chemicals that are designed to make them inedible. That doesn’t mean grains are slowly killing everyone, but it could mean for some sensitive people that replacing grains foods from slightly further back in our evolutionary history (like tubers or green vegetables) will have a positive impact on their health. I would be interested to know what you think of the physical anthropology data presented in Weston Price’s book which compares the results of indigenous diets to those of a modern diet that includes processed and refined carbohydrates.
The fact remains, our bodies spent a lot more of their evolutionary past in an environment that offered high-fiber plants, nuts, seeds, and wild animals with a nutritional profile (especially where fats and amino acids are concerned) that is utterly different from domesticated animals. This is especially true when you considering we ate more organ meat in the past. Research supports we should be eating a plant-based diet with plenty of fiber and avoiding refined grains and excess sugar. It’s not far-fetched that evolutionarily novel foods can pose a risk to our health. You can find as many examples as you want of evolution moving quickly–our eating of cooked food is one of them–that doesn’t mean every member of the human race is adequately prepared for eating grains or dairy.
Furthermore all this talk of one example being meaningless is irrelevant as well. When it comes to health, we are not yet far enough along in our knowledge of the human body to apply the answer of statistical significance to every problem. If someone makes a behaviorally sustainable dietary change that lowers his cholesterol or his weight, or helps him manage his blood sugar or pressure–if it has some measurable, positive impact on his health, who are we to dismiss that? I accomplished all of those things by eating a whole food diet consisting mainly of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, meat, and seafood. That doesn’t mean the diet I ate in any way approximated what people in the Paleolithic era ate–they often starved, or over-ate, or found food with meager nutritional value as compared to the produce we have today. But it does mean we can achieve positive results by combining some of these concepts with a common sense approach that’s supported by research.
The item in question appears to be a repackaging of Cassidy’s Ph.D. thesis. Somebody has uploaded it here, if you can tolerate Scribd (m.m. Docstoc). It looks like Indian Knoll (the hunter-gatherers) had substantially worse infant mortality but did somewhat better past that point. The question is how generalizable this is, unless somebody is advocating a version of the “paleo” diet that is largely based on river mussels and snails. Given the choice, I’d take Hardin’s beans, squash, and corn purely on culinary grounds.
Cassidy is also briefly summarized here.
Have the foodies come out to play?
How about taking a trip to Thailand for some good paleo coffee?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2012/12/28/elephant-dung-coffee-intrepid-foodies-thailand/1797347/
Apparently this coffee is better that coffee “brewed” and flavored by the civit cat…because of the slow passage of coffee beans through an elephant’s digestive tract.
For all of you who love hot brewed tasty coffee sans caffeine, I’m plugging the taste and dark roasted “Kirkland” brand from Costco. I brew it with Dunkin’ Donuts decaf…because Kirkland is even too strong for me.
@WLU – “MTR, have you seen the CI almost no-knead bread, made with beer? ”
Beer bread is great, especially when camping. Very practical. I’m planning on making some when I go on a camping trip later this year … that is, if I can to the beers before my Canadian friend drinks them all.
Bother, I pressed enter without finishing. I wanted to ask if any of you have a personally tried and trusted recipe for beer bread I can use under what you might call “basic” conditions, i.e. miles from anywhere, with only a pot to cook it in and a gas bottle to cook on.
And it’s “if I can get to the beers …”
the bug guy
“The business issues with companies like Monsanto have not so much to do with biotechnology as they do with old-fashioned business practices of buying out competitors to gain market share.”
But doesn’t the biotech give Monsanto additional market resouces through patent law?
Kathy, I would never even contemplate baking bread while camping. How do you prevent the raccoons (bears, deer, skunks, chipmunks) from getting it while it rises?
BrewandFerment,
“In Dec I bought 25 lbs of dark roast decaf from Coffee Bean Direct for just under $200 US including shipping”
How much to ship to Mooroolbark, Australia?
@Chris
Cooks Illustrated (fhtagn!) has a recipe for flaky, foolproof pie dough that I’ve also made dozens of times, and produces a delicious, flaky crust, every time. There are two secrets – mixing the dough-flour paste with half the flour first, then adding the second half (causes alternating layers of dry-oily flour which bubble in the oven into separate layers – flakes!) and vodka (or any other high-alcohol content liquid, which adds fluid without adding water, thus no gluten, and also actually inhibits gluten formation).
Though not a shill for Big Pharma, clearly I am a shill for America’s Test Kitchen (fhtagn!). I’m one of the middle-aged guys who couldn’t cook discussed in their recent NYT article
@MTR
You could try looking into the writings of Mark Lynas, a founder of the anti-GMO movement in the 1990s who recently gave a public speech admitting he was completely, totally, 100% wrong. Probably much shorter and possibly more convincing since he had to traverse such a large intellectual distance.
@Afronaught
I don’t know if anyone has said that HG suffered from the same magnitude of “diseases of civilization” as we currently do (or even ancient farmers). The point is more that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not a magical panacea that prevents all disease. You can’t “eat like a caveman” and magically be healed of all your ills, dying at the age of 126 after 125.5 years of perfect health. The “diseases of civilization” existed in the HG past (or there was potential they did, I’m looking at you type II diabetes), but they were of lower magnitude, less deadly and killed less often. At a certain point in their histories, HG were almost certainly better fed than farmers, but as I’ve discussed above, it was when they moved into a new environment when their populations hadn’t reached a saturation point. Once you hit the point at which you have too many people to live casually off of what food you can find, you either starve or start to farm. There’s probably a population “sweet spot” at which life is pretty good in a lot of ways. You just have to kill your offspring to stay there. Humans aren’t that forward-looking, particularly in HG days. There’s no conception of “OK, right now we’re fine, but given our current rate of population increase, in three generations we’ll reach the carrying capacity of all land we can comfortably walk to in a day, so we’d better start murdering babies”. Hell, where I live there’s outrage over female infanticide that doesn’t involve strangling a baby.
Heh, so I guess what I’m saying is “What BrewandFerment said”
The substitution is about 50% of the water for vodka or something equally high alcohol % (I think around 70 proof). I usually fudge on the amounts and add a little more to get it even more rolly-outy.
@evopsygirl
But anchoring them to mythic paleo ideas adds nothing. If you’re testing things empirically, the evolutionary history adds little more than a “just-so” story, one that ignores the significant impacts of post-HG history which itself had a tremendous impact.
Which, like many pro-paleo arguments do, ignores the fact that humans have been selectively breeding those traits out of their foods. Your comment about dairy ignores the fact that most of us can only drink dairy as adults because of evolutionary pressure to do so due to significant time spent by ancestors who were agriculturalists that raised cattle for milk. There’s no a priori reason to believe we can’t eat grains because we can’t handle the toxins. The human gut is a potent thing, and the human liver is too.
The Weston Price foundation is an ideological organization, not a scientific one. They’re not interested in any evidence that doesn’t support their pre-existing conclusions.
But again, the gut is quite capable of disarticulating these foods, adaptation to a new environment (that of farming and agriculture) exerts its own tremendous pressure on human selection, and most of the foods we eat now have been heavily modified to be more nutritious and useful to humans over tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of years. You simply can’t eat like a hunter gatherer, that kind of food doesn’t exist anymore (certainly not in significant volumes).
Mmmm…gout…Also, we may have eaten more organ meat in the past, but in volume we still ate far more muscle. Not to mention, there is considerable evidence showing humans as scavengers, not hunters. We ate rancid meat and organs.
Science already understands the risks of heavily processed foods, paleo is parasitic on those efforts, adding little more than a superficial, ill-thought-out pseudoscientific “just-so” story on top of that knowledge. And again, you’re ignoring the history of food. Either you go into “deep time” and the only foods we “should” eat are found in Africa, or different races shouldn’t eat foods from different continents – which is nonsense. Not to mention the significant amount of breeding of ancient foods to reach the point that they look like now.
Also, one idea about human evolution is that cooking was a main and huge driver of Homo sapiens evolution.
Nope, but we sure can apply statistics to a lot of things. You seem to be arguing that because we don’t perfectly understand how all humans react to all foods, we can’t make any statements about anything. Which is nonsense.
Oh seafood! An incredibly paleo food (so long as you live next to a seacoast).
If someone makes the decision to eat in accordance to the USDA food guide, which is what paleo diets are in large part, that’s great. If this imaginary person convinces themselves their diet is going to cure all their ills, they’re actually putting themselves at risk for nonscientific reasons. I hope you’re getting regularly tested for previous risk factors. I don’t dismiss eating a healthy diet, I dismiss the superficial, unscientific reasons people use to organize their diets, which can result in harms (and I like pointing out that their “scientific” reasoning is anything but, and not based on the actual “paleo” lifestyle in any way – you’re embracing an incoherent idea).
So why call it “paleo”? Why not call it “following conventional dietary advice”? What’s different or unique? Whole fruits and vegetables, lean meats, whole grains, avoid processed foods…what is so uniquely “paleo”?
Okay – “You could try looking into the writings of Mark Lynas, a founder of the anti-GMO movement in the 1990s who recently gave a public speech admitting he was completely, totally, 100% wrong. Probably much shorter and possibly more convincing since he had to traverse such a large intellectual distance.”
WLU , So the message I’m getting – GMO is the first new technology that has absolutely no possible pittfalls. I heard similar claims when I first started working in ecommerce (before the tech bubble burst), from the guy who tried to sell us that exotic mortage and from one of international adoption agencies we spoke with (shortly before the country they specialized in shut down adoptions due to corruption concerns). Luckily, I didn’t believe them either.
But then I am not anti-ecommerce, anti-mortage, anti-international adoption or anti-GMO, I just have a deep and abiding “hope for the best, plan for the worst” philosophy. You can not hope for the best unless you are willing to believe in the benefits that a change can bring. But, you can not plan for the worst unless you focus on finding the pitfalls of ANY product, system, technology.
“So why call it “paleo”? Why not call it “following conventional dietary advice”?
You have got to be kidding me, even without the context, the word Paleo just sounds cooler. USDA has the branding finesse of General Motors.
@mousethatroared
Biotechnology is certainly not without problems and pitfalls. However, they do not match up very well with the common fears about gmo varieties currently in use.
Transgenic technology is also not a panacea that will solve all of our agricultural problems. It is a powerful tool among many available to help us address the coming challenges in sustainably providing food for a growing world population.
@the bug guy – Yes! that is the thing that concerns me. The majority of the concerns I hear about GMO are NOT valid. If I heard more intelligent discussion of real pitfalls and plans for dealing with them, I would feel much more comfortable with the process.
…because, you know, I’m in charge of the world food supply and everyone comes to me for approval on these things.
Also, thanks for your thoughts. You are very good at offering clarity to these discussions.
@WLU “you’re embracing an incoherent idea”. You said it – “incoherent” is the right word for this. It’s a big jumble sale of bits and pieces, all stuffed into one room and you can go and (cherry-)pick which bits you fancy buying into.
There’s a lot more to real paleo diets than simplistic persons think … and the operative word here is “diets” not “diet”.
@Mouse: it may be cool, but paleo lays claims that go beyond mere branding, they claim scientific backing. Not on.
Anyone that’s watched a actual baboon foraging won’t fancy imitating its diet. I wonder what the nutritional value of scorpions and other assorted bugs is? And before you say, “A baboon is not a human”, anyone fancy a plateful of mopane worms? I know where you can buy them dried, if the shop still stocks them (bought them myself and ate – one).
@kathy
Many insects have good nutritional value, though as you demonstrate, we tend not to find them palatable.
Kathy – Agreed, but the name “following conventional dietary advice” still pains my branding sensibilities.
Oh, of course not! GMO has risks (a personal favourite – Monsanto managed to breed single-generation crops whose seeds would not germinate, I had a wonderful post-apocalyptic scenario in mind in which humans managed to starve themselves to death due to pollination by non-germinating plants). But those risks tend to not be the ones envisioned by organic farmers and anti-corporate protestors. The risks, from what we can tell, are generally not cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome or autoimmunity. In fact, I am hard-pressed to think of an example of an actual risk to human health due to GMO. Certainly you could engineer crops that contained viable smallpox particles, or were 50% cyanide or the like – but why would you? Again, corporations are greedy, not evil. There are definite pitfalls, regulation and testing is needed, there will be unintended consequences – but there are also tremendous benefits, staggeringly good ones at that (imagine a crop that could generate its own fertilizer, was immune to pests, produced a complete protein, contained small amounts of every single necessary nutrient, was salt, drought and flood-tolerant and delivered vaccines; we’re not there yet, but theoretically it is possible!).
The thing is, these crops are studied by very, very smart people, and it is in their motivation to produce a safe, viable crop that meets a significant need. These people, far smarter than you or I, spend their days thinking about how they can make better plants and animals, what the implications of their changes are, and further – will publish their ideas for scrutiny by other, equally or even more smart people. Meanwhile, the spurious objections to GMO are often made by farmers justifiably concerned for their livelihood (who might be excellent farmers, but are probably not very good biochemists or geneticists), and knee-jerk corporate critics who don’t understand the science and aren’t interested in learning.
There needs to be regulation, testing, oversight and whistleblowing legislation and protection. Government and scientists provide these things, not an amorphous mass of ill-informed protesters who cherry-pick the data. The world is getting more complicated, and I would give far more credence to the objections of a small number of experts than I would an enormous number of nonexperts.
Who does your planning though? Or your hoping for that matter? I would say it should be experts, because most people don’t understand the true risks involved, the biology, science and technical objections.
The Netherlands (I believe) has an interesting way of bridging the science-popular divide. They form a committee of citizens with no scientific training. They are then given an extensive briefing by scientists (I believe explicitly including “for” and “against” scientists at that) that extends over weeks. At the end, the committee makes a decision or policy for the government.
And as for the potential pitfalls and whatnot, yes they must be studied. But as I mentioned above, one must also look at the benefits. The precautionary principle is based on possible harms, meanwhile GMO crops have the potential to address actual harms. For some crops, it genuinely can be a case of “someone might get cancer 40 years from now” versus “we have regular floods and droughts and it’s almost impossible to guarantee an adequate food supply for our citizens over a five-year span”. Or “200,000 children go blind from vitamin A deficiency, and it’s hard to regularly get enough vitamins to the areas where they are needed” versus “this breed of rice produces enough beta-carotene to prevent 199,000 of those cases of blindness”.
Certainly not a simple problem, but it irks me that the objections raised have been examined and addressed already, often many times over, often decades in the past. It’s a profoundly helpful, amazingly productive technology with enormous potential that is rejected due to slogans (“Frankenfood!”) rather than the real evidence. An entire branch of science cast aside and vilified because organic farmers have good PR and the public is susceptible to the naturalistic fallacy. Obviously an oversimplification, but one that contains germs of truth.
Quality job, Dr. G. I have added this to the Wikipedia article on the paleo diet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet
WLU – See you agree with me. You’re just afraid to admit it.
I’m love listening to experts and scientists. They are indeed the best ones to suss out pitfalls. But experts and scientist don’t always get heard, in corporations or in government. Many people want to shush them because they are getting in the way of profits. So I see it as my job as a citizen to look for experts, scientists, etc who are voicing concerns or making recommendation and support them, if I feel they are making a compelling argument.
As to “In fact, I am hard-pressed to think of an example of an actual risk to human health due to GMO”
I’ll say it again if a pitfall produces a large crop failure and food prices rise, that means is an actual risk to human health, often to populations that are most vulnerable. But I think what you are saying is “actual risk” from consumption, not actual risk from a change in agricultural practices. Which I keep agreeing with.
Have you considered the possibility that a more straightforward discussion of the true pitfalls of GMO might redirect people into a more constructive discussion?
I read somewhere (possibly even here, in which case apologies for repeating it) that chimps, who are not great meat eaters, will often revisit their feces a la rabbits. Except in this case, they pull out the undigested meat pieces and re-consume them.
Gross.
“First, by definition the Paleolithic period ended 10,000 years ago. Therefore your evidence of artherosclerosis in more recent populations is irrelevant. If you want to dismiss Cordain’s argument in the way you have here, you’ll have to find evidence of this disease process happening readily before 10,000 years ago, in populations that didn’t eat grains or dairy.”
I like how Cordain et al. use evidence from modern foraging populations like the San and Kitavans when convenient and yet you dismiss it? Tell me, what magical process happened 10,000 years ago that would make people living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle like the San somehow so different from their paleolithic counterparts? People were already eating grains before 10,000 years ago anyway, they just weren’t domesticated yet.
@WLU
Your mention of ‘terminator’ technology (properly, GURT-Gene Use Restriction Technology) raises another good point. Even though never commercialized, it continues to be singled out as some kind of horror story, while to the contrary, it would seriously reduce many of the complaints about the risk of biotech contamination or of biotech traits going wild.
Anastasia Bodnar wrote a good primer several years ago on the subject:
http://geneticmaize.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/gene-flow-ip-and-the-terminator/
@WLU:
As regards my concerns on over-supplementation risks of “enriched” crops, you’re right that it’s probably not really a risk at all. {wrinkles nose} Looking back on it, I had to introduce a supplement just to get a viable example of the risks. As regards your comment to MTR about how “these crops are studied by very, very smart people, and it is in their motivation to produce a safe, viable crop that meets a significant need”, I’ll admit that I’m with MTR that I’m less worried about the science and scientists involved in it, and more about the business plan and the CEOs who may not be looking past “this will guarantee an excellent fourth quarter profit, and I’m retiring in a year, so that’s all I have to worry about”. And, of course, unintended consequences of things they didn’t test for in the labs, but that’s pretty standard. The world is filled with short-sighted attempts to fix an ecological problem that ultimately became worse problems, c.f. multiple cases of invasive species.
@Billy Joe,
Sorry mate, I didn’t know you were an Oz denizen…but surely there is something similar there? You are at least as close to one of the great bean growing countries as I am in NY USA, if not closer.
@WLU–yup, what I said, cuz I was in fact referring to the same Cook’s Illustrated recipe you were. Sometimes I read their articles just for the explanations of the processes even if I don’t want to make the recipe. They have a great sourdough recipe too.
@ lilady, guilty foodie here–but I draw the line at balut (fermented duck embryos) and the silkworms which were for sale on the streets in China. Crunchy outside, gooey inside, tomato hornworm green–yuk. I would have had to get so drunk that I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the act of chewing…and the durian I tried once wasn’t fabulous enough to be worth getting past the stink. But fishhead stew in Singapore is yummy (although the fish cornea or whatever it’s called was a bit startling–felt like a plastic bead when I bit it by accident)
As far as scorpions and bugs I’m sure our ancestors ate them. Currently in Asia I understand insects and spiders are often consumed. I’ve read Eskimo children relish botfly larvae which are said to taste like strawberries and primitive peoples eat grubs. Where I live bears gain a lot of weight in the summer from eating cuttworm moths which they find under the rocks on talus slopes. Each moth is said to have the nutritional value of a peanut and a bear may consume thousands in a day.
To put this in perspective, the naturalist and author Bernd Heinrich once described his breakfast as something like this:
“Cooked unformed embryo from a fowl, secretions from the mammary gland of an ungulate, bitter water in which a ground up seed from a coffee plant had been boiled and sweetened with an excretion of an insect’s gut” (he’s a beekeeper and gets all his sweetener form that).
@the bug guy
Very interesting, thanks! Completely destroys my ideas for a postapocalyptic novel, but that probably just would have ended up with Monsanto being burned to the ground anyway. It’s amazing how, knowing what I do about the nutjobbery and antiscientific objections of CAM and related nonsense, I am still tempted to write a book featuring these tropes. I’d need some sort of “look, this is fiction, the reality is nothing like what you read here” appendix though. I was struck by one amusing objection Bodnar includes:
If this were true, you would never have famine because all those resiliant seeds would just keep growing due to the unpredictable weather. This is actually a reason why GMO research is being done on crops, to try to build in, in a much more surgical and predictable way, the existing positive traits of some crops into others. My mythic polybenefit grain above would be the holy grail, the ultimate achievement of GMO, a single crop that could literally grow anywhere, under any condition, and be literally the only thing humans would ever need to eat to survive. My word, we live in interesting times! GMO seems like a much better long-term state investment than the crop subsidies currently used and much maligned in the corn belt of the US. But you’d need some sort of brilliant solution like rule by robots for that to happen, the free market and government are unlikely to produce it.
I keep going back to the lack of scientific objections to GMO. If people want to protest, protest business practices, funding and regulation. Write a letter to your congressperson about the need to heavily invest in publicly funded GMO crop research whose results can be released under open license. If we undertook a Feed the World with GMO Crops project along the lines of the Human Genome Project, chances are the influence of Monsanto would be far less pernicious. If some sort of magical baseline improved crop could be produced that addresses many of the nutritional needs of the world’s population for free after initial investment, that’s a win for nearly everyone. Even Monsanto could find a role in further improving them (perhaps by investing in taste-improving technology if the nutrition issues were already taken care of).
And to address other points – balut is gross, I don’t understand the Asian love of “cartilaginous” as a valued food texture. The best part of Cooks Illustrated is the narrative, since that’s where you find the underlying principles. Honey is better described as “bee vomit” if you are going for the maximum yuck factor
If we undertook a Feed the World with GMO Crops project along the lines of the Human Genome Project, chances are the influence of Monsanto would be far less pernicious.
Now you’re talking WLU – Does GMO have an open source* movement? I just don’t happen to differentiate the science from the business practices, so much, in my mind, the business practices should be guided by the science of the process.
hmm, possibly the foundation of a good sci-fi espionage novel.
that “hmm” should have a * before it.
the bug guy:
At a science talk I attended about GMO by a biologist (who has been targeted by some anti-GMO activists), the academics complain about Monsanto for getting patents on published research done at a university, that then restricted their use for actual research. As a result universities and other research institutions have become better at using the patent laws. He said when certain patents expire, there will be more opportunities opened up for research.
BrewandFerment:
WLU:
I heard about that when the CI folks were talking about their new book on Science Friday a few months ago. Because of that reminder I put The Science of Good Cooking (Cook’s Illustrated Cookbooks) on hold at the library.
WLU:
Tonight’s dinner is a take off of a rice dish from near the Golden Triangle (middle eastern). Except it uses cauliflower, which is nothing like its original brassica, only being noted in Arabic writings in the 12th or 13th century (using wikipedia). Plus there is yogurt sauce using garlic, mint and cucumbers (which according to wikipedia is ancient, though probably not the type I got at the grocery store). Not to mention the changes over the past several millenniums on chickens. Though the cumin, garlic, allspice and other spices are probably pretty close to ancient.
WLU:
From the talk I went to a few years ago, there was the celery that had the same pytophototoxin poison that exists in giant hogweed (same family). If the plant juice gets on your skin, it causes a burning rash when exposed to sunlight. So that particular crop of celery harmed the pickers. The only problem is that I cannot remember if it was a GMO or a conventionally bred variety. (our experience is when my younger son was young and a friend grabbed hunk of giant hogweed and used it like a sword, my kid ended up with a nasty rash)
Also, WLU, in the postapocalyptic novel, you have to also take into account that the food crops and animals that have been created in the last ten thousand years need humans to breed and grow. There is a reason that many animals are artificially inseminated, and that many plants do not spread on their own (unlike many weeds). The things that made them better to eat would not be part of “natural selection.”
That was the part of Tomorrow’s Table that I retained the least of, lacking a pre-existing frameowrk of expertise or awareness within which to integrate this new information. I go further than you in that I think everything should be guided by science, but doubt that will be the case in my lifetime. And there are many advantages to private industry that science probably can’t anticipate or incentivize. Plus, science usually can’t resolve the “is-ought” dilemma; it can tell you how to do something, rarely can it tell you whether to do it.
Oh yes. I’d like to see one that doesn’t turn the company into the villain though. It plays to easily to our prejudices.
@Chris
I own Science of Good Cooking and you can get most of the information from their magazines. I managed to blaze through it in a very short amount of time since I was already familiar with most of the 50 principles discussed, which they often reuse. I apparently have a pathological inability to refuse to buy their products. Fhtagn! There’s actually a good case to be made that CI’s business practices are themselves quite suspect, given their tiered memberships, republication of much of their content and artificial splitting of magazine, website and business branch. But they produce such damned good recipes…
WLU “Oh yes. I’d like to see one that doesn’t turn the company into the villain though. It plays to easily to our prejudices”
See one? WLU – didn’t I tell you? You’re writing this. Things to consider, if you go the other way and the open source group (collective) is the villain, than you end up with Neo- Ayn Rand stuff…. there’s always the rogue government or terrorists to fall back on (because THAT doesn’t play too easily to our prejudices, right?).
Good chatting with you WLU , always thought provoking.
Always nice to have a civil disagreement with someone. Challenges to our views should be welcomed.
Matthew Woodring Stover’s Acts of Caine series (specifically Blade of Tyshalle I believe, which doesn’t seem to be sold anymore unfortunately) had an interesting take on your ideas and suggestions. Much of it is gory sci-fi/fantasy (it manages to actually bridge the two, unlike the lazy propensity to simply shelve them together in bookstores) but he manages numerous interesting points and situations. He actually has both evil corporations (like, really evil, like “literally causes pain and suffering for fun” evil) and a crowd-sourced…for lack of a better term, “mass soul gang-rape”. Having read it, I would never do anything but imitate it. Poorly.
I like Matt Stover’s work.
@MTR:
Obviously, the best way to handle it is to show the benefits and drawbacks of both sides. The corporations are more organized, but more rigid. The open source movement isw coming out with results in leaps and bounds, but the “information must be free” crowd leads to potential for “script kiddiez” to cross poison ivy and kudzu and seed the local park with it, or for someone well-intentioned deciding that we need to bring back a prehistoric plant in the local parks (shades of the guy who released all of the birds from Shakespeare’s plays in Central Park, leading to the current starling problem) or forgetting to add a self-limiting factor when he puts together a plant to pull excess heavy metals out of the soil so that it can be disposed of with the leaves.
I don’t think I’ve seen a realistic take on open-source GMO. I’ve seen a number of takes on nanotechnology and 3D printers. I’ve seen fantastic takes on everyone having access to gene-manipulation (you know, the sort where crossing yourself with cat genes is a fashion expression and retrogenes can change your sex in seconds). Could be interesting.
Ironically, a lot of the organized opposition to gmo varieties and regulatory expenses have driven most of the research to large corporations. While we have some close to open source gmo technology (such as Ring-Spot Virus resistant papaya in Hawaii and the long in development golden rice), the costs for many more can only be born by large corporations. Even when smaller companies, such as Okanagan Specialty Fruits develop biotech products like the non-browning Arctic Apple, they run into considerable opposition.
There is a considerable amount of research on biotech crops and safety, with a lot of it independently funded. The GENERA database is a good listing:
http://www.biofortified.org/genera/
DugganSC – the way you put it…that whole open source GMO sounds increasingly unappealing. (sigh) Still works for post-apocalypse fiction, though.
@MTR:
Technology advancement a difficult thing in a lot of ways. Knowledge has always had the potential to upset the balance of power. The chief difficulty, as alluded to by “the bug guy”, is resources. Most likely, genetic modification will remain the province of large corporations or government for some time because of the cost of equipment and materials. But eventually, things probably will get cheaper and thus more accessible. There have been certainly been similar debates over the years over the secret formula for bronze, the ingredients to an effective love philtre, the components of gunpowder, and how to build an atomic bomb. We’ve definitely had it more recently for encryption protocols, security vulnerabilities, and 3D printer blueprints (fairly recently, we had the guy who was posting blueprints for assault rifle plans, which really kicked the hornet’s nest).
@DugganSC
More or less, the technology to mostly open source a lot of biotechnology development is already available and surprisingly affordable. The major costs of bringing new crops to market are regulatory and litigation-protective research.
They’ll have to be an actual GMO post to bring anti’s here it appears.
This week at my U, a sports-medicine-type prof wrote an anti-GMO screed from nutritional perspective in which he worried about increased IGF1 levels in GM salmon, referencing two papers that high IGF1 is bad wrt to cancer (like you’d expect for most any growth factor). And he wasn’t worried about the salmon getting cancer, he was worried about people eating the salmon. Watch out, there may be EGF in there too. It was pretty bad in other ways as well, and was embarrassing. Some commenters found it outstanding though.
Terminator technology:
Farmers near me have grown hybrid corn for many decades. One of my profs was old enough to have been around for some of the early development, and told stories that in their test plots, their beautiful hybrid corn ears would go mysteriously missing. Next year some of the nearby farmers had some corn plots that were filled with hopeful monsters of every description.
@rork
Any comments from said sports med type regarding the digestibility of IGF-1?
A guest post from a genuine expert or at least researcher on GMO would be very, very interesting (though it strays from medicine). Perhaps a guest post on the health benefits (potential or actual) and health detriments (potential or actual) of GMO crops.
Your story about the practicality of farmers is amusing to me
“Any comments from said sports med type regarding the digestibility of IGF-1?”
Of course not (it would kill the point), despite his claiming nutritional expertise in a nutritionally oriented article. Whether he knew if it were a small-molecule hormone or a protein wasn’t clear.
Further horror: the Frankenfish had about 5% less of various amino acids and a few other things, but please fail to notice that it has 5% more fat and so might have 5% less protein – I like my chinook that way, although I’m spoiled on wild upriver brights (from the Columbia, at my brother’s, they cost >$20/lb at the store), and so have the luxury to disdain farmed fish. When it came to omega’s 3 and 6, and several other things that might be no worse or even better in the evil salmon, he had a great solution: switch to comparing to wild chinook rather than farm raised. Arrrrgh!
Also please, stick to cane sugar, cause the local stuff is increasingly from *gasp* frankenbeets (to be fair, he didn’t use that term, and I forget if those are Bt or RR or both near me).
Disclaim: It’s not like I think there are no worries. I take GMOs one at a time. As an angler (and educated about population genetics) I have high concerns about fish farming of any kind, due to environment, disease, and gene escape.
What, you mean like a rational person?
Just a little factoid here: in the last millennium of pharaonic civilisation, especially in the roman period, mummification was practiced in a widening demographic such that we have mummies of people who were definitely middle class. With the excavations at Amarna we are getting lots of skeletal remains of the poor, some of which have tissue. So, why do we keep saying we only have the remains of the wealthy? It has more to do, I think with the lack of care taken by excavators and museums of the poorer mummies. Before the second half of the twentieth century, archaeology in Egypt was more about getting nice bling for the museum and studying art history. Hence, if you find a crude coffin, it gets stuck in the storehouse and not published. It certainly doesn’t make the display in a large famous museum. Hence we have this idea that the poor didn’t have funerary monuments. They did. We just don’t see or read about them much.
I apologize for arriving late to the party, and thereby possibly repeating arguments given above. Also thank you, Dr. Gorski, as always, for this amazingly detailed and persuasive (and funny!) post.
However I do disagree with some of the philosophical assertions made in the post and the comments. My apologies if I don’t give anyone a charitable interpretation of their argument…
First, it is true that “paleo” peeps despoiled their environment, were very cruel to animals, etc. However without advanced technology, their ability to do so was quite limited. So it would still be fair to say their despoilment, cruelty, etc. were far less than ours (at least to my mind), right? I assume your professor, Dr. Gorski, would agree to this.
Second I think it is very fair to say Western society (and industry) has wrongly destroyed some native peoples. Whether those people lived in “harmony” or not seems to me beside the point (“harmony” is modern people’s justification for why those cultures were great…it is not the justification those cultures would give themselves (and as you point out they were not harmonious anyway))
But mostly I find it odd both sides (paleo and what I’ll call “skeptic”) cash out the good life in terms of conventional modern values like health in old age, low mortality, even environmental damage.
It’s an empirical question, of course, whether ancient humans really suffered so much from (for instance) high mortality. I can’t begin to comment on this question…but I’m skeptical. I doubt paleo folk suffered from high mortality anymore than I suffer from not living to be 500 years old (even though people in the future may live to that age). And I doubt they suffered the lack of modern technology anymore than I suffer from not having teleportation, time machines, downloading sandwhiches, or whatever else the future holds.
At least the small bit of evidence I’ve accumulated in my blockhead, people have not always viewed death or aging like we do. It is not Paleo people, or Romans (like Seneca) or other ancients who tell us high mortality is awful. It is modern skeptics and the “paleo” crowd who live in comfortable circumstances. And it is not these ancient groups who tell us aging, even terrible aging, is a problem…it is people like Mercola, Cordain, etc. (viz people who have never used their body for anything serious). My suspicion is that people who actually face these “hardships” (and I did recently) have come to terms with them and would not consider them the reason one culture is better than another.
The argument over whether industrial society is the greatest is interesting. But it ought not be framed in such a way that death, aging, disease, etc. (ie the very values of industrial society itself) are the indices of greatness (or at least I think those indices need more argumentation backing them up).
Again, great post as always Dr. Gorski.
-David
Actually, our paleolithic predecessors were quite capable of large-scale changes to the landscape, through fire and extinctions. Firing the prairies to drive animals as well as permit certain types of plants to grow better generated columns of smoke that blotted out the sun in Europe. South America is the heaviest-modified continent in the world, immense tracts of land are very, very thick with layers of ash and broken pottery; they cultivated trees rather than crops, and many of those trees are still present, bearing fruit and siring offspring. See 1491 by Charles Mann.
The question of “right” and “wrong” regards native populations is not one science can answer; they were certainly on the losing side of a battle for land and resources. However, there are arguments that can be made that their use of the land was less efficient than European equivalents, and that as seminomadic people who frequently warred amongst themselves, the ones we historically associate with various territories are merely the second-last in a long line of settlers, and in the Great Lakes regions would farm the land for a decade then relocate when the soil became too exhausted to produce adequate yields (a common problem in Native settlements). The last in the line of settlers, of course, were Europeans. See First Nations? Second Thoughts by Tom Flanagan and The First North Americans by Brian Fagan (the latter addresses farming techniques as well as long lists of Native groups that arrived, exceeded the area’s carrying capacity, and died or relocated). Is what happened to the Native Americans truly a unique, horrific crime? Or merely one in a thousand such incidents of war and battle over territory, merely played out here with different partners and perhaps differing in scale (mostly due to epidemics, not necessarily war). See Guns, Germs and Steel as well as 1491.
As usual, it’s complicated. I don’t think these moral points will get much play on a science-based medicine blog (but perhaps! They’re favourite topics of mine to discuss).
Thanks for the comment WLU! Very interesting as always!
@WilliamLawrenceUtridge:
“These people, far smarter than you or I, spend their days thinking about…”
No. No, they are not.
While you and I may disagree on a few things your writing indicates a mind that is capable of grasping problems of moderate complexity which means you’re not a f*ing idiot.
The HR department at Monsanto are subject to the brutality of the Gaussian Distribution just like any other company. They need head count, they need butts in white coats, just like IBM or Google.
This isn’t to say that GMO is bad. Something like 8 million children have died in the last 8 years because Greenpeace and other shitheads opposed “Golden Rice”. Monsanto has done some f*d up things to various farmers and communities, but it’s not science, it’s law, baksheesh and greed.
A couple things about Paleo–I’m not a memeber of the Church of Paleo, but I do try to eat in the Primal/Paleo/Evolutionary Fitness are of the diet world. I fail a lot, and pizza is in NO way part of that world, which means I’ll never be completely that way.
But it’s important to note a couple thinks that Dr. Gorski either misses or ignores:
1) We simply do not need to consume as many calories (generally, across the population in the US) as we did in, to pick a date, 1960. This means that we don’t NEED to eat as many calories. However much of our micro-nutrient requirement still exists. Breads and grains provide lots of macro-nutrients, but the vitamin and minerals they bring to the diet are often replicated elsewhere. You can generate a rule that says “eat no grains” and still get a much more complete diet than if you said “eat no meat” or “eat no vegetables”.
2) Exercise is supposed to be part of the whole Paleo schtick. Not the “40 minutes on a gerbil wheel three times a week” type of exercise, but a mix of high intensity resistance training and just more moving.
If you do something to get people eating healthier foods and moving more you are going to get lots of people who report feeling better. When you have people dropping 20 to 200 pounds off their frames, you’re going to get less arthritis, less type II diabetes (I wonder how many of these folks were borderline or undiagnosed type II?)
I know that last year in the Jan/Feb time frame I got my wife to dramatically modify her/our diet to one based mostly on meat and vegetables, leaving out a LOT of the grains and starches (she’s polish and walking away from potatoes is hell for her) and between that and, a set or two of kettle bell swings and pushups a couple times a week and doing more walking and bike riding (her car died, and we lived in a place that was moderately walkable) she dropped from 175 to 155 in about 3 months, and has now kept it off for almost a year, even though we’re not in a walkable climate/location any more.
There has been a LOT of changes in our food supply since WWII. Most of the population has gone from eating a mostly fresh-food diet to eating a mostly preserved and processed food diet. Our breads have gone from long rise yeasts (that tend to break down the phytic acid) to much quicker rising yeasts (that don’t). We’ve gone from useing sugar in moderate amount to haveing everything so g*d*n sweet it’s disgusting (we take the fat out of food and add back in sugar, or HFC etc.).
I don’t think we’re so smart as to be able to engineer nutrition, and while I don’t the the more religious aspects of Paleo are good I do thing that the diet and lifestyle they espouse is better than the stupid “food pyramid”.
As to their rather rosier view of history than *all* of the evidence suggests, well, we all have things we believe in in the face of prevailing evidence, now don’t we?
Archaeological evidence of bodies dating back only 5000 years in insufficent to refute any the claims made my paleo advocates. People who lived c. 3000 BCE were already 5000 years into the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic Era. Modern evidence suggests that heart disease, as evidenced in the mummified bodies mentioned in this article, analysis of which makes up the bulk of the article, is actually caused by a grain-heavy diet which doesn’t provide a healthy balance between omega-6 and omega-3 essential fatty acids, or by eating animals which have been fed evolutionarily incorrect feed, *not* by eating naturally-raised lean meat.
The fact that the author of this article did not see these two huge, glaring holes, among the many others included in their hypothesis, demonstrates that this is not, in fact, “science-based medicine”, as the website domain name purports. In fact, this is not science, at all, let alone bad science.
“These foods included, predictably, cultivated foods such as bread (made from grain), rice, and potatoes. Zuk couldn’t resist asking a question, namely why the inability to digest so many common foods would persist in the population, observing, “Surely it would have been selected out of the population.” Cordain’s response? That humans had not had time to adapt to these foods, to which Zuk retorted, “Plenty of time.””
Not only is this merely an anecdote, it is such an over-simplification of the topic as to be utterly useless, and furthermore, it ignores the entire history of food preparation. Yes, Homo sapiens sapiens has evolved in minor ways over the past 10,000 or so years, but we didn’t suddenly grown a rumen or the ability to digest phytates. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the only means of leavening bread was via the sourdough method, which dramatically reduces phytates. Beginning with the introduction of factory-grown yeast cultures, we now commonly eat breads which contain high levels of anti-nutrients. The only evidence you need to understand the action of anti-nutrients is to look at the levels of severe malnutrition in developing countries who have little to no meat in their primarily grain-based diets.
Many populations have also either lost the ability, or never had the ability, to synthesise long-chain omega-3 essential fatty acids from short-chain varieties, depending on their access to seafood. These long-chain omega-3′s are critical for brain development.
All unfermented grain- and legume-based foods contain significant levels of anti-nutrients. How sad that a publication that purports to be science-based immediately castigates any mention of our intuitive understanding of the natural world as a naturalistic fallacy, regardless of the merits of the actual data.
This is not even bad science; it’s not science, at all.
Considering the claims made by paleo advocates are just that – claims, and fairly slippery ones – it’s not really an evidence-based discussion. What claims, exactly? Do paleo advocates claim their diets cure all diseases of all humans? Make a specific claim, support it with references rather than assertions about what ancient humans ate, then we can discuss.
Did you not read the part of the article discussing the Unangans? No agriculture in the Arctic circle, but still atherosclerosis. In fact, they’re nearly a perfect test-case for paleodiets since they combine extensive marine food sources, large amounts of exercise and zero access to grains.
Dearly would I love to see this evidence, since you don’t provide any in your comment. You might also note that modern humans, despite their allegedly horrific diets, have nearly twice the life expectancy of hunter-gatherers. Of course, the chance of getting spear through the belly (or narwhal tusk through the eye) does impact this.
Mmmmm, straw man…the sample of the study included hunter-gatherers, and you ignore the cumulative and positive nature of science. No studies are perfect, so future studies must test, address and triangulate with previous findings. Demanding “magic bullet” perfect studies, in fact, isn’t science. Plus, science and scientists start with evidence – not assumptions. Paleo diet starts with assumptions and makes massive recommendations based on them – the idea that there is a mythical “paleo” time, that humans stopped evolving, that humans are so homogeneous that one diet is adequate for all people.
Not that we had to – instead, we developed ways to process foods to make them more digestible. Not to mention, phytates bind to certain minerals. Aside from that, phytates don’t really seem to be much of a problem.
People with no access to seafood develop perfectly normally. I eat seafood perhaps once or twice per year and appear to be suffering no ill effects. And the best sources of omega fatty acids from seafood come from cold water species near the poles. The cradle of humanity is Africa, rather far from the poles.
…easily addressed through processing (i.e. fermenting) or changes to diets. And really only causing micronutrient deficiency for certain minerals.
Here you just sound like a condescending douche. Just to let you know.
As opposed to listing a whole bunch of claims without references and selectively attending to only portions of the relevant topic while ignoring confounds, contradictory information and ad hominem arguments?
@William B’livion
” Our breads have gone from long rise yeasts (that tend to break down the phytic acid) to much quicker rising yeasts (that don’t).”
Technically, it isn’t the yeast that has changed but the form and the usage. To the best of my knowledge, all of the yeast used (save naturally occurring yeasts used in sourdoughs) are saccharomyces cerevisiae. Historically, this was commonly sold to bakers and homemakers as refrigerated blocks of yeast. Now it is most often sold dried and granulated (active dry) or more finely granulated and treated with ascorbic acid (instant yeast). For what it is worth, bakers have traditionally added ascorbic acid in one form or another as a conditioner so the addition to instant yeast isn’t new. What is new is rapid rise techniques that produce lots of bread in a short period of time but rob it of its flavor and character.
I’m an amateur artisanal bread maker so I’m definitely not a paleo. But you do make interesting points about the relatively weak contribution of grains to one’s diet (other than calories) versus, say, the contribution of vegetables.
Still, I think the primary point that Dr. Gorski was trying to make is that a paleo diet is not a magic bullet or somehow ‘better’ than other diets; that there is nothing magical or evolutionarily preferential about it. A generally Mediterranean-style diet with plenty of fish, vegetables, olive oil and, yes, grains, is a perfectly reasonable diet as is any that provides necessary nutrients while limiting unnecessary calories. I’m pretty sure that paleo man wasn’t a big consumer of olive oil and barolo
And, as you noted, getting off one’s a$$ and moving around a bit is vital.
William B’livion:
How does that work for places that have cold winters? Do you think my mother had fresh fruits and veggies in February while growing up in Eau Clair, WI during the 1930s? Did I imagine the shelves full of canned food, including pickles, in my grandparents’ basement. Did I imagine canning peaches on a September afternoon with my mother’s cousin? (by the way the pears she canned with a slice of citrus like orange or lemon were divine!) And since my grandfather was Norwegian, how do you explain lutefisk as being “fresh food.”
Since I have an edible garden, I am confronted each fall with a large amounts of apples and some pears. Am I supposed to eat them all in October, or do you think it is okay dokay that I process them into frozen slices, sauce and dried fruit? By the way, my apple butter is lovely on ham. Do you think no one before WWII ate ham, a form of preserved pork?
@Chris
Apple butter …. Mmmmmm
Lutkefisk ….. Mmmmmmm, apple butter
@William B’livion
I got so engrossed in bread that I neglected my two more important items. You suggested that Dr. Gorski “either misses or ignores”:
1. We need fewer calories than during times when we were less sedentary, and;
2. We need to be less sedentary.
While Dr. Gorski may not have touched on these issues in this particular post these have been common themes in diet related posts by him and other contributors at SBM.
windriven, the apple butter and ham are very nice on freshly baked whole wheat cheese biscuits.
Hmmm, wait: cheese is a way to preserve milk. William B’livion, did you know that cheese was a preserved food used before WWII? It is an absolutely ancient way to use milk, and a gateway to dairy use before humans developed lactase persistence. As noted by this 7000 year old find in Poland.
I held off on replying to this, but I suppose I will now.
Yes, yes they are. The people who investigate GMO are far, far smarter than me, at least in terms of GMO, genetics, biology, chemistry, virology, and I have no doubt many other things. The objections I raise or denounce about GMO are based on widespread principles. I can point out that our stomachs digest proteins down to individual amino acids, that cross-breeding is uncontrolled in a way that viral insertion of BT DNA into corn does not. I can’t speak to specific genes, I can’t explain how a specific protein makes a grain more salt or flood tolerant. I can’t visualize molecules travelling through biological pathways. GMO has been thought about by brilliant people, lots and lots of them, and they have looked at it from biological, medical, nutritional, economic and ethical perspectives. Their objections are not about the science, it’s the infrastructure, distribution, economics and ethics.
People who bitch and moan about Monsanto should write to their friggin’ congressperson to support widespread funding of GMO research at universities using federal funding dollars so these corps can be open-sourced, and so the nonscientific objections can be addressed. The reason Monsanto is the only place doing this kinda research is because of the stupid objections and pressures placed on regulators driving up the costs so only large organizations can bear them. Hate evil corporations? It’s in your capability to do something about it.
This whole paleo thing is such nonsense anyway. It’s concrete recommendations, if you can pin them down, are substantially similar to the USDA ones, perhaps substituting fruits and vegetables instead of grains. The sole specific objection I’ve seen, mineral deficiencies, isn’t a problem in the first world that I’m aware of. The area seems rife with arrogance and certainty however, and that’s annoying. As if there is any reason to even believe there’s some sort of single, magical diet that will let you live forever in perfect health. For a set of assumptions that seems to be based on evolutionary underpinnings, proponents seem woefully ignorant of the fact that there is essentially zero evolutionary pressure to live a long, healthy life. Evolution is about ensuring genes survive, which means once you pass breeding age, there’s no pressure to maintain health (yes, kin selection, blah blah blah, but that’s far less direct and impactful than direct parent-child evolution). Exercise is similarly redundant to regular, mainstream recommendations.
@Chris
Lutefisk sounds gross – fish alkalinized to the point that it falls to slimy pieces, left to ferment. Is it like cheese, where it smells atrocious but tastes OK and proteiny? Lots of short-chain amino acids? Blech, I don’t even like regular fish!
WLU, when properly prepared lutefisk essentially turns into a jelled fish, that really does not have much taste. It is eaten with white sauce and allspice sometimes. It was a way to preserve fish in Nordic countries where there are several months where fresh was not possible.
I’m currently reading Paleofantasy, and I see that she brings up my main bugaboo about GMO crops, biodiversity. To a large degree, this is more about human psychology than the science involved, but there’s a risk of people deciding that a given crop is a silver bullet, and creating a single point of failure if we get something unexpected on the scale of the Irish Potato Blight. Very good reading.
As I’ve come to expect from books recommended on this site.
Pickled herring, anyone? that’s preserved. An acquired taste, to be sure, but I like it. Jerky and pemmican are two ancient preservation methods that I am specifically aware of in relation to North America. I think they date back far enough to trigger the “paleo seal of approval.”
Here’s an interesting tidbit from The Day of the Flying Fish, by Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason Magazine Nov 2007:
“As Sasha Issenberg tells it in The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy (Gotham), sushi began in the fourth century B.C. as a preservation method for whitefish. Packing the fish in layers of rice helped it keep longer and lent both the fish and the rice intriguing new flavors. By the early 19th century, techniques had changed. The rice was flavored with vinegar and the fish with soy, and sushi could be created in seconds, without the long wait for fermentation.”
Despite its present status, sushi was originally food cart fast food for common laborers. Whatever the origins, if given my choice I prefer fish (saltwater that is) sushi style over cooked. Wouldn’t say the same for freshwater fish of which I have never gotten terribly fond except maybe for catfish if prepared to eliminate the taste of mud.
@BrewandFerment
” The rice was flavored with vinegar and the fish with soy, and sushi could be created in seconds, without the long wait for fermentation.”
Nonetheless, most Asian cultures have variants of well-aged fish. The Koreans, for instance, are fond of skate (devilfish, rays, whatever) that has been ‘aged’. It is a taste that requires rather more acquiring than, say, pickled herring
Striped bass (a common freshwater fish) can be served as sushi though it does taste a bit muddy and, of course, unagi – the most common eel in American sushi restaurants – is a freshwater creature.
The Swedes too have a buried fish; theirs called surströmming. It is perhaps the most evil thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. But I found that if you eat it as the Swedes do, chased with considerable quantities of aquavit, it grows on you after a while.
Don’t forget the Korean version of sauerkraut: kimchi. It was definitely a way to preserve cabbage, with lots of chili, and some versions have fish added.
@Chris
My best friend is a Korean guy; we make kimchi together from time to time. His mother makes the best kimchi I’ve ever eaten. Joe and I use his mother’s recipe but it is never quite the same. That recipe uses, among many other ingredients, oysters (!) and tiny little shrimp that come packed in saline in big glass jars. The result is a kimchi that is deep and complex.
***
If your favorite itamae has a creme brulee torch, have him make regular salmon nigiri then torch the salmon until the surface has dried and changed to a tannish color but not blistered. I first had it this way in Vancouver, BC with a dab of a hot-sweet sauce but prefer it with just a squeeze of lemon. You would not believe what that small bit of torching does to the flavor!
“My best friend is a Korean guy; we make kimchi together from time to time. His mother makes the best kimchi I’ve ever eaten. Joe and I use his mother’s recipe but it is never quite the same. That recipe uses, among many other ingredients, oysters (!) and tiny little shrimp that come packed in saline in big glass jars. The result is a kimchi that is deep and complex.”
I love kimchi – and I can’t think of kimchi without thinking of bi bim bap, which I love even more. You guys are killing me.
windriven, that salmon nigiri sounds wonderful. That is not a very tradition way to do it, but the torching would cook the salmon only slightly and give a nice maillard reaction. Unfortunately I don’t get to many sushi places on vacation, I seem to be married to the only person from Vancouver Island who hates fish (he also hates camping). Though the last time we were north of the border, we did get some good Korean food in Richmond, BC.
My only issue with Korean restaurants is that there is too much food, especially with the little plates. Though a nice bike ride away is a French inspired Korean restaurant I want to try: http://joulerestaurant.com/menu/dinner/
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Chris, using the words “jellied fish” still isn’t making a case for eating lutefisk…nor does briefly torching sashimi, no matter how delicious Malliard reactions are in other foods.
Tell you what, let’s divide the culinary world. You can have all the fish, and I’ll get all the pork. Once in a while we can trade some fish and chips for some bacon, so everybody wins
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