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there are people who buy into the whole diet/fitness angle of paleo, and then there are people who make a bit too much out of it, and it turns into almost a religious following. They're as minimalistic as possible, run barefoot because they feel shoes werent around in paleo times, so they much be negative... things like that. I 100% condone eating as natural and organic as possible... but certain things that extreme portions of the paleo community look down on bother me.
Oh. I love running around in my bare feet but I have to tell you...I love modern conveniences waaaaaaaaaaaay too much to ever actually become a retro cavewoman. I'm all for progress, I just want to get well.
Oh. I love running around in my bare feet but I have to tell you...I love modern conveniences waaaaaaaaaaaay too much to ever actually become a retro cavewoman. I'm all for progress, I just want to get well.
Hey, all...checking in...feeling pretty good non-cravings wise...eating on plan and exercising. I still have my latest rash but it's going away. Will keep everyone updated for the sake of (a very small bit of ) research and anyone else is still welcome to chime in.
In short, there was no single hunter-gatherer foraging strategy, and genes no more "designed" our eating behavior than they designed our language or our ways of relating between the genders.
I'm left wondering what's the payoff to be had for pushing a popular diet as rooted in a mythically homogeneous, predictable human past. The lure of a good story may play a role. It's a mighty powerful image: our ancestors roaming over the landscape, perfectly in tune with their bodies and the environment. Some of my anthropologist colleagues refer to this pining for a pristine past as a paleo-fantasy.
This is interesting, but the fact (and it really must be a fact...or else one hell of a universal coincidence!) that no two HG bands ate exactly alike doesn't mean the Paleo diet itself must be off.
That's because the Paleo diet just doesn't include foods that didn't exist yet despite the variety they were eating prior to the Neolithic.
Paleo (as I understand it, from having read two books on it so far) doesn't say you have to eat exactly the same things in exactly the same ratios. It's more about telling you what you can't eat on it: foods processed way beyond their natural forms, sometimes to an unrecognizable state.
And yes, that part does have to do with genes. Of course we evolved to eat a certain set of food groups. Every animal has. As omnivoires in general, and as opportunistic creatures in particular, early HGs almost certainly ate everything they could within those food groups, whenever they could find them, making their diet very varied even season-to-season (or more often than that) even within the same HG tribe.
But Paleo does point that out as well: some people who eat Paleo, do so seasonally according to what foods grow when. I don't (eek) but obviously those people aren't even getting their own "same" diet year-round, because they don't have one. It constantly changes. Just like with HG tribes.
Genes absolutely do dictate what an animal can or can not eat. Otherwise, wouldn't we be able to digest cellulose as some other animals can? But we can't. Try feeding your cat oats and soy milk for a month and see what happens. Or take koala bears away from their eucalyptus leaves and give them something with a similar "nutritional profile," but that is not a eucalyptus leaf, and you'll have a dead koala in no time.
Why the heck would humans be any different??? We're animals too.
As for grains and dairy: grains' defense mechanism to protect the germ (which is really the embryo) involves blocking our ability, chemically, to break down their specific proteins (gluten), causing various types of distress. Smart animals manage to gnaw raw wheat (ugh, ever tried it? I challenge you) one day, then got a bellyache and went away and didn't eat it the next day. But in this way we're not smart animals. We boiled, leeched, dried, ground, mixed and pounded the grains until we could physically eat them (although probably not without many forms of distress -- witness the diseases that seem to have been "born" during the agricultural era).
Dairy: Meh. No other animal breast feeds past the age of infancy and it's proven science that the majority of adults to not produce lactase to digest lactose and that's that. There's no "weird theory" in that one at all so I'll just leave that one alone.
All that said: Still Paleo, feeling very good, way less tired. Don't know if that's specific to cutting just the grains (since cutting out the grains has worked in a positive way for me in the past) but I'm not going to sc r *w with anything yet.
By the way, I think I know what you're talking about as regards that caveman "Utopia" feeling some people seem to have. Someone told me that's all related to Cross-Fit and that it's pretty cult-like. I don't do Cross-Fit so I don't know, but that's what I heard.
I definitely don't think HGs wandered calmly over the earth picking this and casually killing that and feeling great. (That's more Adam and Eve-ish than scientific, I believe.) They felt like sh i t a lot of the time...medicine was, although complex, way less advanced than today; it was too cold sometimes, too hot other times and too rainy or too dry...with no plumbing and no forced air or electric heat or air conditioning. Infection must have been a huge problem (though it got much bigger once we started living in larger groups due to necessity in making the agricultural wheels turn, which is a VERY labor-intensive process; close bodies times a hundred means breeding germs times a hundred).
Lost teeth couldn't be replaced. Nothing lost could really be replaced...eyes, arms...Plus, at that time, we actually had predators. A huge portion of the globe simply doesn't have these, certainly not on a day-to-day basis, to contend with today. HGs did.
There were no vaccines (yes, I know vaxes are controversial to many) and if, say, smallpox broke out...well, it broke OUT. It hit EVERYONE. Or nearly everyone. You might or might not get sick from it. You might easily die from it and it wasn't a good death.
Babies born with issues, let's take a congenital bowel obstruction, for instance, had no recourse. They had to die, slowly and painfully.
Conditions could be miserable for Paleo people. I have absolutely zero doubt in that.
I'm not doing Paleo because of a romantic, nostalgic feeling about something that never existed.
I'm doing it to get well...with the added benefit of living in a very, very, very physically and medically coddling era and society. I am lucky. Why would I want to have all that at my fingertips, but accept shuffling through this charmed life feeling like sh i t because of what I eat?
Dairy: Meh. No other animal breast feeds past the age of infancy and it's proven science that the majority of adults to not produce lactase to digest lactose and that's that. There's no "weird theory" in that one at all so I'll just leave that one alone. ...
That is incorrect. The majority of people -do- produce lactase. Some produce more than others, and the production distribution is influenced by genetics -and- evolution of the species. Lactose intolerant people generally produce -less- lactase than non-intolerant people, but most of them -do- produce it, nonetheless. And that's that.
So: you got that fact wrong, and you have been shown by others to have gotten several other facts wrong. You are basing your conclusions and opinions on facts that have been proven to be incorrect. How much longer will you continue to argue in favor of your flawed opinion, before you choose to consider the actual facts, and re-consider your stance? Or - are you simply arguing because you insist on being right, even when you're wrong?
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I'm all for progress, I just want to get well.
) research and anyone else is still welcome to chime in.
