The Paleo/caveman diet

[JDizzle]

Who here eats a caveman diet?

My diet is mostly red meat, chicken, fish, fruits, berries, leaves, vegetables, eggs, nuts, milk and water.
Occasionally I will have rice, maybe once a week. I cannot be 100% raw food but its better then what alot of people eat. Most importantly on the whole I have a greater sense of wellbeing.
But our food supply is increasingly becoming contaminated. That 'atlantic salmon' you just bought for your protein intake was probably farmed and fed all kinds of shit making it inferior to a real wild atlantic salmon. Ever seen a fish farm? You dont want to.
I hear in the US cows are being fed excessive amounts of soy bean. We all know what soy does to testosterone and estrogen balances.

I never go for fat free or anything like that, infact if it says reduced cholesterol or reduced fat alarm bells ring and I avoid the product.

Heres a video to watch, struck a cord with me, very powerful. Of course if you are not interested in health then close thread now but for people wishing to be healthy and strong with high testosterone levels, and massive drive to achieve in your powerlifting/bodybuilding take a look
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCFZoqmKf5M&feature=player_embedded

 

[Fadi]

Who here eats a caveman diet?

Thank you very much for that post Dizzle. I myself do not eat a caveman diet but I do eat the occasional raw meat dish. The diet I subscribe to is the Mediterranean diet. Unlike the caveman diet, the Mediterranean diet does have a fair bit of grain in it. Have you checked it out? It does not forbid anything and all is in moderation. However two aspects that make it really successful and health giving are its sustainability and the manner in which it's enjoyed. I'm speaking about the cultural attitude here with the family gathering around the table enjoying their food in a tranquil atmosphere versus a rushed and stressed one (as is the case most of the time these days).


Fadi.

 

[PowerBuilder]

the paleo diet is possibly one of the best diet stratagies i've ever put into place into my life. the approach to having 60-70% of your calories from fat, 20'ish from protein lays a solid foundation for a lean, muscular & productive body. the name of the game in weight training is weight ratio, in terms of how much you weight compared to what your lifting. if you were 100kg & you lifted 100kg that's 1:1, if you were 92.5kg & you lifted 100...that's obviously more impressive.

i could talk about the paleo / anabolic diet all day. it's that good

 

[JDizzle]

Yeah I break the rules of the paleo starting every morning with 2 serves oats/porridge, and I do cook all meat and fish (except oysters).
When I said 'raw' I meant unprocessed unrefined food that you buy, then if needed cook it.
Not 100% caveman raw I know but a hell of alot better then buying frozen pizzas and corn flakes.
Also the weekend is where I really slip up as im working, but the 5 days during the week I smash the fruits and vegetables fatty fish meat and eggs.
Still drinking regular full cream milk 1.5-2lts a day for bulking, gotta try unhomoginized raw milk sometime

 

[eaglebay]

Interesting diet, its basically what most people talk about here in not eating anything processed. If it walked, swam or grown from soil than eat it.
How much raw meat did they eat? I would be pretty sure they invented cooking meat on a fire so not all of their food would of been raw?

 

[Kyle Aaron]

No, because I am not a caveman. Besides which, real cavemen didn't have the "palaeo" diet anyway, they had much less meat and more grain.

At least 30 of my 35 or so meals a week are food which I prepared myself from raw ingredients. A good guide to healthy eating is that none of your food should have the little star on your market receipt that indicates it had GST.

That's not "palaeo", that's just the standard diet of about 5 billion of the world's 6.7 billion people. Most people make their own bread from flour, cut up their own vegies, eat fresh fruit, and so on. The human species has survived some 200,000 years without frozen pizza and Uncle Toby's Fruit Rollups.

 

[PowerBuilder]

No, because I am not a caveman. Besides which, real cavemen didn't have the "palaeo" diet anyway, they had much less meat and more grain.

At least 30 of my 35 or so meals a week are food which I prepared myself from raw ingredients. A good guide to healthy eating is that none of your food should have the little star on your market receipt that indicates it had GST.

That's not "palaeo", that's just the standard diet of about 5 billion of the world's 6.7 billion people. Most people make their own bread from flour, cut up their own vegies, eat fresh fruit, and so on. The human species has survived some 200,000 years without frozen pizza and Uncle Toby's Fruit Rollups.

get off your high horse & take a breath.

in the paleo diet book, it talks about not necessarily eating raw meat (tho there is some discussion about it's benefit), but rather eating how og the caveman would've eaten 30,000 years ago. Having a diet centred around protein & fat & with minimal carbs...since they didn't have the technology or no-how to deal with grains. And if you think about it, they had no way of storing their grains, so come the winter time...they were ****t.

The athletes paleo diet is slightly tweeked since modern athletes are a lot different to what Og the cave man was like. The author discusses about having a pre workout high GI meal 2 hours before training, followed by a similar meal (of course with protein) post workout. Other than that, the diet is generally the same.

 

[Kyle Aaron]

get off your high horse & take a breath.

You've become a lot more aggressive on the forums lately. I was against Shrek banning you, temporarily or otherwise, and said so. But you should still calm down.

in the paleo diet book, it talks about not necessarily eating raw meat

I didn't say anything about the meat being raw. I said they had less meat and more grain than the "palaeo" diet supposes.

In hunter-gatherer societies which survived long enough to be studied, most of the calories come from gathering. Our archaeological and palaeontological studies of extinct hunter-gatherer societies show that it's very likely they were about the same. They varied a lot according to the terrain, of course; those in forests ate little grain, those in plains and savannah ate a lot.

The male hunting parties usually get meat only every few weeks or even every month, the rest of the time they sit around telling stories. This makes sense: if they ate meat every day and in large amounts, the local large herbivores would have become extinct in a few years instead of a few hundred or few thousand as they historically did.

As for grain, people seem to imagine that we went from eating none at all to one day suddenly inventing the hoe, settling down and planting fields of grain. It didn't work that way. Grains come from natural grasses, they're just the seeds. People would gather and eat these, and there's a lot more grass out there than nut bushes or natural spuds or squirrels to eat.

Aboriginal cultures here had a semi-agricultural lifestyle, in that they didn't settle down and hoe fields, but they did select grasses with lots of seeds and encourage them to grow. They'd pick out the weak, stunted and small ones and toss them on the fire, the big ones they'd set some seed aside and put it in the soil. Then when they wandered past a year later there'd be some bigger seeds for them to eat.

All together, this means that "cavemen" ate much less meat and more grain than we commonly suppose. The "palaeo" diet may or may not be good for us, but it is not based on what real palaeolithic peoples ate. Og the caveman 30,000 years ago had a surprisingly small amount of meat and large amounts of grain.

He certainly didn't have frozen pizza and Uncle Toby's Rollups, though. I don't think that this or that diet is "natural" is really a useful argument. It's natural to die of dysentry from bad drinking water or for women to die in childbirth but we don't seem too keen on that stuff. TV and cars and computers and sitting on chairs rather than squatting down aren't "natural", but we all seem to be keen to keep them.

Many things are "unnatural" but we keep doing them anyway. Some things are "natural" but we avoid them. So the question ought not to be whether or not this or that is "natural", but whether the thing does us harm or good.

It's plain that when processed food makes up most of a person's diet, it does them harm - heart disease, diabetes, poor skin and hair and nails due to poor nutrition, lack of energy and so on.

It's less plain that having rolled oats with milk or grainy bread toast with vegemite does us harm.

 

[TGM]

^ Does it really matter what it's called? In the end a diet centred around whole unprocessed food isn't a bad thing.

A few months ago I switched my diet to paleo, at that time I wasn't getting any exercise.

In two months I dropped six kilos and cleared up my fatty liver. A friend of mine also cleared up his fatty liver in about three months by just following a paleo diet. So al in all I've had god experiences with it.

At the moment I'm trying to stick to paleo + dairy. I've been able to gain weight these last two months on that diet. (Weight gain while working out I mean.)

I find it's pretty easy to switch to, I don't even mind dropping the bread.

And anyway, alot of meat + fruit + veggies + milk + eggs is damn tasty.

 

[Shrek]

The only processed food I'm having at the moment is a tiny bit of low fat, low sugar yoghurt every morning, cottage cheese 2-3 times per week and a dash of milk in my coffee.
Everything else is unproccessed.
Eggs, chicken, lean meat, beans, brocolli, fruit, nuts.

I guess whey and cassein protein is processed so add that.

The point is I have no bread, pasta, sauces, take away, canned food, frozen food etc etc.

 

[Kyle Aaron]

The chicken and cattle you eat were fed the "unnatural" grain we should not eat. The eggs were laid by chickens fed the grain, too. The milk comes from cows which could not survive in the wild; in 6,000BCE they gave about 300ml milk a day, now it's 8 litres or more, they've been bred for it over generations.

The nuts and fruit were also bred over thousands of years to have a high yield, these plants generally do not survive well in the wild.

There's no escaping it. All we can do is choose the degree of it. Making your own meals from fresh ingredients is definitely better. Whether those are mostly grain, mostly meat or whatever isn't too important in terms of health - but the world could not all live on a mostly-meat diet, and certainly not if we expected the meat to all be grass-fed.

 

[PowerBuilder]

at least get to know what your arguing against kyle. The paleo diet advocates a low milk intake. The thinking behind this is that when Og was walking the earth, milking a cow was not hard...it was pretty bloody tough...since cows weren't domesticated. There's another arguement about the low consumption of milk which is that calves drink their mothers milk to become a grown up cow. Just like you (perhaps) drank your mothers milk to become a full grown adult.

 

[pseudonym]

I mean no offence or disrespect by this but a few posts here betray a need to learn a bit more about this topic before making comment.

I'm not offering my own opinion because I too have much to learn about nutrition and how food works (and specifically the way a paleolithic eating strategy operates) but let me offer some links which have broadened (and continue to broaden) my understanding:

www.robbwolf.com - if you're into the semi-academic approach this fellow's podcasts are a must (even if you're not you'll probably get something out of them).

thepaleodiet.com - Professor Cordain's site, I recommend skipping most of the sales pitch stuff (though I hear his books are worth a read) and look at his research papers. I'm a self confessed nerd when it comes to needing to know why things work like they do and, when I can understand them, Prof. Cordain's papers scratch that itch nicely (I do not claim to understand everything he writes though - I'm not a biochemist after all ).

I further encourage anyone interested to google 'insulin sensitivity' or 'insulin resistance' and 'food/diet' and read what pops up.

To address the topic I myself do not follow a strict paleo approach to eating because I am;

A: ignorant of the finer details (though endeavouring to educate myself), and,
B: lazy/stubborn.

That said I am trying to ingrain a 'paleoesque' approach to my food by limiting processed carbs, upping fresh fruit and veggie intake and trying to keep my meat as 'natural' as possible (free range poultry, wild caught seafood, grass fed beef and lamb - none of which is easy or cheap to find I'll add). I still consume lots of milk and often fail to get as much quality fruit and veg as I should so I am far from being a proper paleo eater (and until I hit 95kg you will have to pry the milk from my cold dead hands).

Regardless of what one thinks of the science behind it or the name given to it how can an approach to eating which calls for fresh lean meats, fruit and veggies, and no processed carbs be a bad thing? what's a better alternative?

 

[Kyle Aaron]

Regardless of what one thinks of the science behind it or the name given to it how can an approach to eating which calls for fresh lean meats, fruit and veggies, and no processed carbs be a bad thing? what's a better alternative?

The Golden Mean.

No drugs, not more than six standard drinks a week. Eats lots of fresh fruit and vegies, nuts and beans, every day have a serving of one or more of meat, fish or dairy, and if you're physically active and/or want to get bigger, lots of starchy stuff - rice, spuds, bread and pasta, preferring wholegrain versions of them.

90% of your food should be cooked by you, 10% of your food do what you like, not much difference in health or performance between 90% and 100% compliance.

Something anyone and everyone can do. No fads, no dodgy "science", no books written by celebrities, just normal food like most of the world has eaten for most of the history of human civilisation.

 

[Goosey]

Like you Kyle- it's just a tool, nothing more nothing less.

 

[JDizzle]

Milk is an interesting one.
Ive heard a few bad things about milk, but I drink 2lts/day as its so convenient for the extra calories and macro nutrients and seems to give a good boost in the bulking process maybe because of this:

The tiny homogenized fat globules carry IGF-1 from milk through the stomach and gut into the bloodstream where they can circulate through the body to exert powerful growth effects

 

[Fadi]

Milk is an interesting one.
Ive heard a few bad things about milk, but I drink 2lts/day as its so convenient for the extra calories and macro nutrients and seems to give a good boost in the bulking process maybe because of this:

You may be referring to the article I wrote on milk.

Bovine IGF-1 is identical to the IGF-1 naturally found in humans. rBGH milk is supercharged with high levels of a natural growth factor (IGF-1), excess levels of which have been incriminated as major causes of breast, colon, and prostate cancers. Now I see members here wanting to drink a truck load of milk so as to get the benefit of this hormone. That to me = excess!

Because IGF-1 spurs cellular growth, some scientists voice concern that at high concentrations it could stimulate cancer. Indeed, higher amounts of IGF-1 are associated with certain forms of cancer, such as those of the prostate, breast and colon. The big debate among researchers is a chicken-and-egg argument: Does IGF-1 promote tumor growth and spread, or do tumors themselves increase IGF-1? IGF-1 is useful to tumors because it prevents their apoptosis.

Complicating the cancer connection is the fact that teenagers, still in a growth stage and thus producing large amounts of IGF-1, have low rates of cancer. By contrast, older adults have the highest rates of various cancers yet also have the lowest blood IGF-1 counts. A more rational scenario is that while IGF-1 doesn’t cause cancer, taking it in large doses may result in tumor activity. One recent study found that higher levels of IGF-1 are inversely associated with testicular cancer.1

References
1 Chia, V.M., et al. (2008). Insulin-like growth factor-1, insulin-like growth factor-binding protein 3, and testicular germ-cell tumor risk. Am J Epidemol. 167:1438-1445.

IGF-1: Killer or Savior? : Iron Man Magazine | www.ironmanmagazine.com

Healthy Living With a Twist - LIME

Milk is a universal baby food in a liquid form. Now unless you're a baby, a baby moo that is, then my advice to you would be to leave the white stuff alone.

So is there anything beneficial in milk that I can use? Sure there is. There's WPC and there's WPI. The former is better than the latter for your immune system with hardly any fat to write home about. And since hormones are carried by fat; you've got no worries here. But isn't milk protein bad for you? Sure, but only if all milk protein was created equal, and we know it is not. Whey protein is not casein protein; it has a different structure to it and it affects your body differently.

PS: I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not attempting to persuade you one way or the other. We're all mature adults seeking to get closer to the truth as we understand it. I've provided you the information about milk the way I understand it and nothing more.


Fadi.

 

[TGM]

^ I had a read through the article you referenced and I don't think there's a solid enough link to say either way whether an increase in dietary IGF-1 correlates to an increased risk of cancer. I'd like to highlight a few excerpts from the article:

Another potential limitation of our study is that all serum samples were collected after the diagnosis of cancer in patients, so the differences in concentrations could be explained by the disease itself and not vice versa.

Data from 2 recent studies measuring IGF-1 and IGFBP-3 in U.S.A military recruits and examining polymorphisms in IGF related genes found no association between these factors and development of germ cell tumors (Chia et al, 2008), although measurements in younger age would be preferable.

The authors themselves conclude that while their study does provide further evidence for their hypothesis it is still not a certainty and further study is required.

Despite the controversy over this issue, many studies provide evidence that there is an excess of neoplastic disease among patients with acromegaly, who have IGF-1 levels above the normal range (Colao et al, 2004; Renehan et al, 2004). Although this increased risk represents circumstantial evidence for an association between IGF-1 and cancer, it is surprisingly modest in magnitude, in that very high IGF-1 levels are not known to be associated with extreme cancer risk. This situation might relate to the fact that IGFBP-3 and IGF-1 are both increased in acromegaly (Shahjee et al, 2007).

That brings us to the crux of the matter. I'm studying radiography, and as such a lot of our course is focussed on the epidemiology and pathogenesis of cancer.

Since learning more about it it always amuses me when people talk about cancer, people seem to focus on unimportant causes rather than the main risk factors. (I'm not implying that this topic is unimportant.) I'd suggest that you limit your exposure to sunlight and limit alcohol consumption before considering milk as a risk factor. And if you smoke that's the first thing you should think about stopping.

Here are the most important risk factors:

1. Genetics
2. Race and climate
3. Age
4. Immunological factors
5. Gender and related hormones (mostly oestrogen)

Unfortunately we don't have much control over these.

Extrinsic factors:

1. Esposure to chemical agents: e.g. soot, smoke
2. Physical agents: ionising radiation, trauma (chronic), inert substances in the body (this is related to trauma)
3. Biological agents: virusus, fungi, bacteria, and parasites.

We have a lot more control over these factors. Diet isn't as important as the aforementioned factors.

So my suggestion is this:

Drink as much milk as you like whilst you are a novice trainee. This period is short enough that it won't increase your risk of cancer significantly. Afterwards you should probably cut it back to a normal level and get your calories from elsewhere. You probably don't need that much milk at this stage anyway, from what I've read a huge amount of milk consumption is really more of a strategy to get skinny novices to put on weight.

And if you're worried about cancer: stop smoking, and be sunsmart as skin cancer from UV rays is one of the most common forms of cancer in Australia. This is even more important for the northern states.

 

[Goosey]

I wonder if you could read read evidence to support both.
Thousands of scientific studies are presented monthly.
I would go nuts.

I sometimes think and feel that science is our new religion.

 

[pseudonym]

I sometimes think and feel that science is our new religion.

Better science than any of the other malarky man's invented for the purpose thus far though eh?