Paleolithic Diets and Fruit

A lot of people talking about primal and paleo diets are really hatin’ on fruit and are big believers in long-term ketogenic diets. Fruit (except for berries and usually tomatoes) is criticized as being just being “candy from a tree” or a fructose bomb. Some folks also lump all root vegetables (yams, rutabaga, turnips, parsips, carrots) into a bucket of things that are simply too high in carbs and avoid those as well. These ideas are not just being pushed for weight loss, but life-time consumption.

First of all, there’s certainly evidence that some hunter/gatherers do eat a diet high in carbohydrate. I’ll start with Kitava, though most people who’ve studied HG diets have seen the material. The best writing I’ve seen is about the diet on Kitava can be found at Nutrition and Physical Regeneration. The original is from Whole Health Source and was written by Dr. Stephan Guyenet. It’s easier to follow the whole piece via the “diet on Kitava” link, however. Long story short: residents of the island of Kitava in Papua New Guinea do not eat grains, refined sugars, processed foods or vegetable oils and get about 70% of their calories from carbohydrate. They eat mostly root vegetables like yam and cassava, fruit, vegetables, coconut and fish. They are not especially active. If they make it to age 50 (keep in mind they have almost no access to modern medicine) their life expectancy is 75, in spite of the fact that 70% of the population smoke cigarettes.

That old Kitavan guy there practically has washboard abs, and he’s standing there in a sarong, holding a machete and smoking a cigarette. I just love this picture, and in case you don’t read Stephen’s piece at Michael’s site, I wanted to make sure y’all saw it. Anyway, moving on.

Infant mortality numbers tend to pull down the average life expectancy of any hunter/gatherer group now or in the past. This is part of the reason for the “nasty, brutish and short” meme one sees in criticisms of the emulation of an HG diet from the purveyors of conventional wisdom. One has to remember to separate the *diet* from the lack of access to emergency care, reliable birth control, pre-natal and neo-natal care and antibiotics. I don’t see any paleos suggesting that one should pass up on the best that allopathic medicine has to offer.

Here’s an interesting piece about the !Kung Diet which is partially a review of The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. The quote below is from her, but read the piece if you haven’t seen it because Don Matesz does discuss it more thoroughly.

“By far the most important staple foods of the Ju/wasi were roots––the twenty-five kinds of bulbs, rhizomes, corms, and tubers. The other foods were either small, such as berries, or scarce, such as truffles, or seasonal, such as certain fruits or the spinachlike leaves. Roots were the everyday meal, and even in some cases were sources of water…For the Ju/wasi as for the people of the past, roots were excellent nutrition, and best of all, unlike fruits or berries, could be noted in one season and gathered in another, as few other creatures were competing for them.”

What the !Kung and Kitavans don’t eat is grains, vegetable fats and processed foods. I’m afraid that in the low-carb uproar, the forest is being missed for the trees.

The two primary texts that recommend a modern version of the paleolithic diet (at least in my mind) are Dr. Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet (2002) and Ray Audette’s Neanderthin (2000). Both of these texts recommend fruit. I ran the numbers on some sample food journals from Neanderthin (post here), and while Audette’s diet is 525-658 (12-13%) calories from carb, it does include fruit. One day he has fresh squeezed orange juice, a plum and an apple. Another day he has apple juice (!), two whole tomatoes and a cup of strawberries.

Here’s one of Cordain’s suggested menus from his “Maximal Weight Loss” menu:

Breakfast:

• Bowl of diced apples, shredded carrots, and raisins with cinnamon
• Poached eggs
• cup of decaf

Lunch:

• Tuna Salad
• handful of walnuts
• mineral water

Dinner:

• Peel-and-eat shrimp
• tossed green salad
• baked salmon
• steamed asparagus with fresh lemon juice
• sliced kiwi fruit and strawberries
• diet soda (uh, just WOW on that one)
  

Snack: cold lean beef slices and celery sticks

The very first thing on his list of “Paleo Snacks” is “Fresh fruit of any kind.” Nuts are on there (limit to 4 ounces a day if you’re trying to lose weight) and dried fruit (limit to 2 ounces a day). Cold meats, raw vegetables, avocado and/or tomato slices, homemade salmon and beef jerky, hard boiled egg (limit to six a week – he’s not a big fan of eggs) and unsalted sunflower seeds (limit to 4 ounces a day) are all on there.

He doesn’t give amounts on his menus, so I didn’t stick them into a nutrition calculator, but this is not what most people consider a low-carb menu. It’s pretty moderate in carbs, but considering that Cordain was, at this point, very anti-saturated fat, the percentages would come up higher for carbs than Audette’s journal that includes fatty meats. Ray Audette is showing 150g of carbs per day and I bet Cordain’s weight loss menu is at 75-100g. These are *not* ketogenic diets, obviously, but they still work. In a diet that eliminates many classes of foods, why eliminate even *more*…forever?

Ah…crud. I still didn’t get to the metabolic issues from low-carb diets, and this is already almost 1,000 words.

Terror of carbohydrates from real foods like fruit are really misplaced. Tropical HGs that eat fruit all the time do fine on that diet and don’t get fat. Fruit is one of the few foods that doesn’t have chemicals to make it unpleasant to eat in some way. It’s brightly colored, and it smells fantastic, and the blossoms do in the spring too – allowing you to find a grove of fruit trees and go back when the fruit is ripe. Most importantly, fruit (not just berries) is real food and you shouldn’t shut it out of your life.

And for pity’s sake, a few carrots won’t kill you either.

I swear I’ll get to the metabolic stuff in the next one.