It strikes me you didn't even have a cursory glance through the links I provided above (not to say you should have, but if you're going to make a claim like you just did it might have been a good idea).
Absolutely I have had a look through, and I've read several books advocating this and similar diets. It's professional - even if I know it's bollocks, I have to be familiar with it because people I'm training will say "have you heard about..." etc.
pseudonym said:
To say that there ain't much science in the 'paleo diet' shows you've not taken much time to understand what exactly 'paleo' eating is all about. It's not a laboratory creation of course but it is based on some fairly well researched truths to do with the human body and it's response to different inputs (food, toxins etc).
It's based
partly on studies dealing with individual inputs. That's one problem with the subject of nutrition.
In most of science, in experimenting they try to hold everything constant and vary just one thing and see what happens. From this they make conclusions about the effects of that one thing. The difficulty is that the human body is more complex than that.
For example, if you consume fibre you absorb vitamins better - so if there are 50mg of vitamin C in an orange, you'll actually get more of them if you have the orange than if you juice it and bin the pulp. But many of the studies that gave us recommended daily allowances are based on people taking vitamin
pills - where most of it will be just pissed away. So the RDAs can be overstated because they're in the lab context, not the context of a complete diet.
There are a zillion things like that in nutrition.
pseudonym said:
For instance grains (and the gluten therein in particular) generally have a very strong inflammatory action in almost everybody (celiacs being the most obvious example but most people have some sort of reaction to them) and by cutting them out almost everybody will see a benefit (reduced instance of autoimmune disease, better insulin sensitivity, better sleep).
Rob Wolf may think so, but it's just not been shown. Large chunks of the world's population gets well over half their daily calories, protein and carbohydrates from grains. Not much lack of sleep, autoimmune disease and diabetes in rural India and China.
Whereas we have a fair amount in the West, where we eat more meat and nuts. Rising autoimmune issues, including allergies, are more commonly thought to be associated with an excessively clean lifestyle (everything bleached). Our immune system seems to be like our muscular system, it needs some work or it wastes away. Not much allergy to peanuts in Madagascar, or gluten intolerance in Kenya.
Rob Wolf is a former research biochemist. Google scholar
shows us that he is or was
interested in phospholipids - those are the compounds that form cell walls. Important stuff, no doubt, but nutritionist he ain't.
So Wolf's just another example of some guy who decides that this food is the source of most of the West's health problems, or that food could solve all those same problems. We get this for milk, food colouring, meat, all sorts of stuff. And from that decision he decides that he can make a fair wad of cash pushing his diet book and consultations.
I've had palaeos tell me I shouldn't eat grain because it causes autoimmune diseases, hypochondriacs tell me I shouldn't eat nuts because it'll create allergies, vegetarians tell me I shouldn't eat meat because "the human body isn't designed to eat it" and it'll give me bowel cancer, that I have to eat meat or I can't possibly build muscles, anti-milk people tell me it'll lead to osteoporosis, and so on. Not to mention the drongos who reckon vaccination causes autism.
So I'm sceptical that they're right
this time, honest.
The simple fact is that human beings are bloody versatile. Through the world and history we have lived on a huge variety of diets and done well on them. The key thing is to get the nutrients in you, a bit of everything. Whether you do that without or without meat or grains or nuts or fruit or vegetables or whatever doesn't seem to be a big deal.
pseudonym said:
With all due respect if you still believe that the 'paleo diet' is prefaced upon some arbitrary notion of what we think 'Og' used to eat well then I am not sure what more needs to be said.
The thing is that this is a large part of the books written on the diet, and a larger part still of the advertising for them. I didn't write these books and adverts, it's not my fault if they want to babble on about what is "natural" to humans. They argue from history, but they don't even know history. Og the caveman had more grains and less meat than they think. And anyway he died before 30, so perhaps not the best example for us.
Like the vegetarians or anti-milk guys, they tell us this or that is "natural" and anything else will lead to an early and unpleasant death. Which is quite obviously bollocks, because it just hasn't.