The one basic assumption of all of the paleo diets (regardless of how well they live up to it), is that this is what we evolved eating and are now best suited to digest and use metabolically.
Meet the real paleo diet:
(If I don't post for a while, it's probably because Sunni and the other paleo types hunted me down and killed me. And likely ate me. Which, so long as they don't cook me, is cool.)
I will confess that all the variants (and the purity tests that some devotees put others through—sounds familiar, no?) can be bewildering to me as well. I have no particular devotion to any of them, so with that said, I'd like to point out that some scientists who study ancient cultures (paleoanthropologists? I dunno what to call them) theorize that cooking was essential for our evolution into Homo sapiens.
ReplyDeleteWithout more data, that's a chicken-egg argument (proto-humans would already be using fire regularly before they found a species-wide advantage to cooking, suggesting that they were well on the way to modern-style sapience anyway).
DeleteAnd I hate discussing something like this based on a nontechnical BBC report that starts by stating, "It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors' diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase.(emphasis added- cb)" If eating meat caused sapience, a lot of more specialized carnivores would have invented the Internet (and be herding humans): lions, tigers, wolves, et cetera. Allowed, yes; we need assorted fatty acids and proteins for neural development; caused? Nope; or not without figuring in many more factors.
The sociological claims (cooking freed up time for social development); might hold water. But I'd like to see some chimp studies on how much time they need to chew and digest raw foods every day.
I'm also leery of applying python digestion-energy studies to human brain growth; some of us ain't snakes. [grin] Of course, if those pythons sprouted thumbs and escaped their cages after a steady cooked diet, I might allow the possibility.
But my (hopefully humorous) point about "paleo diets" is where do you draw the line? And why? What is "paleo" enough to count? Even taking the BBC story at face value blurs any supposed line: If cooking helped, why not division-of-labor monoculture agriculture that freed up even more man-hours for technical advances? (Bread is good, because it made time for the smiths to learn to work ores and metals, inventing new tools.)
What I find interesting is that the scientific study used by both vegans and the paleo folks is mutually exclusive, even though both cite serious scientific stuff. And, of course, there are a zillion other theories in between and in all directions - often with more or less "scientific" backing.
ReplyDeleteMe? I'm certainly interested in good nutrition, and I do my best, but I eat what I want, when I want it. Nobody's going to live forever anyway. Might as well enjoy it. :) And I'm happier and healthier than I've ever been, no matter what "diet" I was trying to follow.