Have I talked about this before?

Paleolithic-style diets have gotten a lot of press of late. The articles mostly take this form:

1) Hipster discusses their caveman diet and explains that all their problems with digestion, allergies, obesity, blood sugar, athletic performance or what-have-you are gone.

2) Reporter says “isn’t that nice” and proceeds to quote sources of conventional wisdom saying that somehow, a diet based on whole, natural foods is actually unhealthy, mostly because it’s lacking in whole grains. There’s also the same spew about how paleolithic people’s lives were “nasty, brutish and short”, so why would anyone want to emulate *that*?

There were two main tomes on this diet: Dr. Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet (2002) and Ray Audette’s Neanderthin (2000) and, more recently, there’s Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint (2009). Good luck finding a reasonably priced copy of Audette’s book – they seem to be going for $70 used. I found one for $13 and snapped it up.

The gist of the diet is this: Eat only meat, poultry, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. Don’t eat grains, legumes, dairy, potatoes or sugar or anything that’s not on the first list. Honey and maple syrup, though they are “sugar” are technically OK since they can be acquired without technology, but they should be rare in the diet as they would be in nature. Potatoes does not mean yams – sweet potatoes or yams are allowed. Peanuts are a legume, in case you didn’t know, and are thus forbidden. Everything else is pretty obvious. Any modern non-foods (like artificial sweeteners) are not allowed. Salt is strongly discouraged, though other spices are welcomed.

Within the world of paleo eaters (and I really need to come up with a set of links at some point), there are differences. Sisson is OK with a little dairy and with an 80/20 approach in general. Cordain allows something called “cheat meals” that you hear discussed often on Robb Wolf’s podcasts (which are quite interesting, at least to me). Ray Audette’s book comes off as more absolutist. Actual practice encompasses all of these camps.

There are some oddities within the books. Some people don’t eat cashew nuts as Audette claims their poisonous shell would have kept cavemen out. I recently found out that people who work in cashew shelling factories actually become immune to urushiol coating on the shells. We’ve all eaten cashews – they are delicious, and I’m think that our ancestors were maybe a bit more clever than Audette thinks. In any case, I’m not going to worry about that too much.

Certainly, there are a lot of valid arguments against consuming another animal’s milk, but I’ve been a big milk consumer my whole life, and except for when I was still eating gluten, I’ve never had problems consuming dairy. I tolerate it well, so I’m not interested in cutting it out.

At the moment, it seems like most of the Paleo types I read stick to very low carb diets. I’ve found that this actually causes more fluctuation in my blood sugar than if I eat fruit. I have *better* post-prandial numbers if I finish my meal with fruit than if I don’t. I have more stable numbers throughout the day this way as well, and with the amount of fruit I eat, it’s not that much sugar anyway.

The studies I’ve seen based on Cordain’s book include fruit and daily honey, and they still produced weight loss and improvements in fasting glucose and blood lipids. I could go on more about this, but Dr. Stephan Guyenet has done this exhaustively, and if you want the science, read his posts on paleolithic diets.

The only thing I ate from my banned list yesterday was tofu shirataki noodles. It’s not much soy, but since that might be like saying it’s only a little poison, I won’t be doing that again as I’ve used them all up.

Oh, and here’s a statement summing up the argument against the “nasty, brutish and short” meme.