"Eat Like A Predator, Not Like Prey": Paleo In Six Easy Steps, A Motivational Guide

[Spats]

However, your understanding of training / performance physiology is inaccurate and I do not agree with it (as I perceive what you are saying).

This is a touchy subject for me because, well, its my job to know.
I say this as a (former) national caliber athlete.
I say this as a consultant to world class athletes
I say this as an exercise physiologist who has "fixed" athletes whom train ineffectively and drastically improved their performance.
I say this as someone who has "known" you for years and whom is challenging you to understand the ideas contrary to your own.

One of the reasons I crosspost things here (instead of just in the paleo echo chamber) is because I learn when things aren't coming across the way I intend them to, or when I need to correct them.

The article is very much aimed at someone who is trying to lose weight, and who is either sedentary or doing low-impact cardio as part of that effort -- something which has been proven over the years to be either ineffective or actively counterproductive. (i.e. "45 minutes on the elliptical, now I'm going to go get a smoothie!" which contains more calories than you burned.)

It is absolutely true that specific sports and activities require specific skills and strengths. I don't pretend to know everything that is involved in that, and I'm sure you know more than I do.

And though there is apparently a big overlap between 'paleo' and CrossFit (although possibly less now that they've cut Robb Wolf loose and cozied up to the Zone Diet), I have no experience with CrossFit. As such, I have no opinion on it, and am certainly not pushing it as a training method.

So it sounds like I need to add some clarification to that particular section: that I am speaking of weight loss and general fitness, not training for a specific sport or goal. If you want to run a marathon, of course you'll have to train steady-state cardio. (Though whether you should run marathons is another question.) And if you want to ski, play hockey, or sport climb, there will be specific training that can help you improve at those skills.

Thank you for your calm and reasoned response. It'll help me improve the article.

[char]

(Though whether you should run marathons is another question.)

What?


-Your article comes off the end all be all of diets, not weight-loss specific FWIW.

[BurnHard]

(Though whether you should run marathons is another question.)

[sidewall]

on the amber lamps

[Spats]

Just for kicks, here's what I ate earlier:

2 little purple potatoes, sliced, lightly fried in butter
Red pepper
Anaheim pepper
Onion
Fresh garlic
1/2 pound hormone-free, grass-fed hamburger
3 eggs (NOT SHOWN...had to put them in last)
Gluten-free tamari, ginger, other spices



BurnHard: that's a great video, isn't it?

That's one way to hunt, and the fact that humans are hairless indicates that daytime hunting was important to us. There is speculation that "the wall", which marathoners hit around mile 20, exists because that's the absolute farthest we ever had to chase anything. Either it dropped long before that, or we never caught it.

Note that the hunter is running through savanna trees, not very quickly...using his brain as much as his legs, and continually shifting pace and direction as traces appear and disappear. Pounding away with heel strikes for hours in a stupefied trance on pavement, or on a treadmill or elliptical, isn't the same thing at all.

Also note that once we got the spear thing mastered, we usually hunted [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_megafauna"]megafauna[/ame]...which is why it's all gone now. It was slower than we are

[SterlingSpikeDancer]

Spats- I like some thoughts of the Paleo diet, but am not behind the logic and reasoning behind it. My stance has always been that I have eyes in the front of my head, and I have developed canine teeth for a reason, to eat meat. To that end, I agree with the poster who compared human diets to bears in the omnivore category. BUT, where I disagree is that we should get with what humans have been eating for millions of years. The problem is that current humans are not nearly where we were millions of years ago. I agree that we evolved and have remained largely unchanged, but some of those changes are evident in size, shape, and even dietary capabilities.

One of your posts in the bread thread mentioned comparing this diet to those of the Masaii (sp?) and other "primitive" tribes. Many of these tribes have livestock and eat meat, and drink blood, but they also drink dairy. SO, I guess the big hangup that I have is the exclusion of dairy from the whole equation. I know there are dairy allergies, but we all come into the world drinking dairy as our sole source of nutrition. I know that we don't continue to drink "mothers" milk, but bovine/ovine/caprine dairy products and milks, to me, fit in with your fatty meats discussions.

Otherwise, and interesting read. I am trying to cut down on my grains, but there are some things that I am just not committed enough to do. Beer is good. So is decent bread, occasionally. I do think that wheat is a bit evil, but that is for the other thread. Thanks for stimulating some thought with the two threads.

[Spats]

The only thing I strongly disagree with is the vilification of seeds. Grain seeds are far different from sunflower seeds or even almonds (which I recently found out are a seed and not a nut). Lots of seeds are perfectly edible, contain lots of energy and nutrients and the fat content is good for keeping you full and don't have the bad effects of grains.

Sunflower seeds are also incredibly high in omega-6 fats (9g per ounce!), which is why I can't recommend them. Same with peanuts: they're really a legume, not a nut, and they're about 1/3 omega-6! Not good.

Other nuts have a much better fat profile. Minimizing polyunsaturated fats, and making sure the ones you get have a good n-3 to n-6 ratio, is one important goal of a paleo diet IMO. PUFAs oxidize (go rancid), hydrogenate, and glycate very easily. There's a reason everyone used to fry everything in butter, coconut oil, tallow, and lard before Ancel Keys' scientific fraud scared everyone away from them.

I'm also confused by your picking glucose over fructose. Most Paleo sources I've read recommend the opposite unless you're an athlete looking to replenish glycogen stores. If you're looking for weight loss then the lower glycemic load of fruit is preferable to the high glycemic load of a sweet potato.

Fructose isn't caught by glycemic load tests because they only, by definition, test for glucose. But fructose gets metabolized in the liver and basically turns straight into triglycerides. Furthermore, it's much more unstable than glucose in the bloodstream (as is galactose) and tends to form glycation products (a sugar stuck to a fat or protein, usually protein), which are becoming strongly implicated in heart disease.

The body is quite good at dealing with toxic substances as long as the amounts are small. I don't know what those limits are and from my limited reading of Paleo papers I haven't seen a discussion of the upper limit of how much is required to get a leaky gut etc. It's all, grains are bad don't eat them. Guess what, there's cyanide in apples and nicotine in tomatoes. We can set an upper limit on how much tuna to eat, why not grains? Maybe it really is that toxic but I haven't seen any numbers to back that up. I have especially strong doubts about legumes being that bad.

Do the reading on lectins and wheat germ agglutinin yourself...that's what I did. And you'll note the link in the article that shows the REAL point of the China Study, which is that the only variable independently correlated with heart disease was...

...wheat consumption.

I'm on the tail end of a 30 day Paleo challenge and quite frankly I hate it. The food is bland and limited.

Did you try here? I link this at the end:
http://theclothesmakethegirl.blogspo...o-recipes.html
Lots of great stuff! Curries, chilies, stews, homemade mayonnaise, chutneys and sauces and who the hell knows what.

I've been losing weight which is counter to my goals and I've concluded that I'm incapable of getting enough calories under strict paleo.

What is 'strict paleo'? No dairy/no potatoes? I'm not a big fan of that unless you have problems with casein. If you don't, go for it! If you can't gain weight drinking half and half, I don't know what to tell you

I'm not strict paleo: rice and frozen yogurt are my two main cheats. (I do eat dairy, which some consider a cheat.)

I know you are well read on the subject so I'm wondering if you have any non-Paleo blog sources I could read specifically about the doses needed in order to see the leaky gut issues or insulin sensitivity problems. I'm really sick of the Paleo hyperbole and would be much happier reading some facts without all of the colourful language telling me that grains=death.

The contention on gut issues is, I believe, that the worst of them specifically have to do with wheat and other gluten grains. Oats are suspect due to being nearly identical in protein structure and usually contaminated with wheat. Corn has some issues, but far less, and rice is the least offensive digestion-wise. It may be that you do better by dropping back and just going gluten-free, keeping rice and occasional corn dishes in your diet.

The blogs I link at the end of the post are all very science-oriented and not hype-oriented. I think Health Correlator, Heart Scan Blog, and Whole Health Source are probably the 'hardest' of the science, particularly Health Correlator.

I think that the more active you are, the more carbs you can get away with. And if you're not naturally fat, you're probably not excessively insulin-sensitive, so as long as you're eating plenty of fat with your carbohydrates.

Hey, if it genuinely doesn't make a difference to you, then don't bother. There's a reason I put at the top "Don’t stress about perfect adherence, or obsess about making it all the way down the list: any progress you make will most likely improve your health, mood, and physical fitness." A lot of people find that just going high-animal-fat, and paying attention to omega-3/omega-6, improves their health dramatically without entirely cutting out anything in the diet.

Just my opinion. Hope it helps.

[Spats]

One of your posts in the bread thread mentioned comparing this diet to those of the Masaii (sp?) and other "primitive" tribes. Many of these tribes have livestock and eat meat, and drink blood, but they also drink dairy. SO, I guess the big hangup that I have is the exclusion of dairy from the whole equation. I know there are dairy allergies, but we all come into the world drinking dairy as our sole source of nutrition. I know that we don't continue to drink "mothers" milk, but bovine/ovine/caprine dairy products and milks, to me, fit in with your fatty meats discussions.

You'll note that the article only excludes milk (mainly as a weight-loss tool...don't drink calories), not cream, butter, or cheese, and doesn't put a prohibition on dairy. You have to experiment with it. Some people find they do much better without it, some find it doesn't make a difference and continue to eat it because it's delicious. Especially if you're white, which means you're very likely to actually digest lactose. And I do say explicitly that there is no reason to exclude butter except frank allergy. There are a lot of paleo purists who won't touch potatoes or dairy on principle. I'm not one of them: I use boatloads of butter, and smaller quantities of cream (and whole milk, when I can't get it).

So I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with you

As far as genetic adaptation, it is absolutely true that the longer a population has been eating grains, the less likely they are to have the HLA genotypes associated with celiac. But wheat contains toxic peptides that are dangerous to everyone, not just celiacs.

[Eastside]

To quote Art de Vaney from The new Evolution Diet:

"Jogging is a useless exercise" and "Bread is the ultimate poverty food-it exists only because grain is cheap, easy to grow and virtually imperishable. Now, in the age of domesticated protein and refrigeration, bread has outlived its usefulness. It is an inferior food that has no place in a healthy diet."

Bread can be yummy but I never eat it unless there is some warm, spongy or crusty really GOOD bread. 99% of it is shit and if you really think about the bread you have eaten lately you'd probably agree. I mean I am gonna eat the bread they give me at The French Laundry-or any damn thing for that matter. I am not going to waste it at the fucking Olive garden's endless breadstick bullshit

This thread is right in line with most of what I have been thinking about today. I eat paleo and am a believer in it's essential values. When I started Crossfit as my primary exercise and pretty much stopped pounding the pavement, I began to notice my body started becoming what I wanted it to be and could not seem to achieve by running. Plus, when I do run now I feel like my lungs are huge. Mucho stamina.

MF

[snowsprite]

Interesting read.

I turned into a big fattie for almost 2 yrs after my son was born. I just ate & ate like I was still preggo. Then I got sick of not being able to fit into any clothing I liked and I got drastic. I cut my portions and started walking. I dropped quite a bit. But I wasn't happy, I wanted to be very lean. I decided I liked Atkins ideas and went on a kind of modified Atkins...deciding that bread, potatoes, and rice were the devil.

12 years later and 72 lbs lighter, I've not gained it back despite the occasional 5 lb fluctuation. Those little spikes usually occur around holidays or when people feed me baked goodies and yummy potatoes and stuff, and I let them. But then I start to feel really gross and I stop.

I feel much better w/ those foods absent from my diet. From time to time I lose my resolve and eat that stuff & pay for it. Lately I've been cheating and eating half a muffin w/ breakfast and eating crackers w/ my cheese and I have noticed chubbiness. But it's so easy to drop that in just a few weeks by completely removing the culprit.

That's my experience anyway and it's really not hard to live w/out the bread/potato/rice. I don't eat much sugar either, treating it as a condiment (I don't stress about eating a few hershey kisses but I don't do that every day). I guess it's not so bad for me b/c I love fish, meat, fruits, veggies and especially bacon. They fill the void fine for the most part until I get really tempted by some of the bad culprits and cave in but I can usually stay away.

In sum, I do not believe in sugar/bread/rice/potato having a place in my diet in moderation. I have kept that much weight off for so many years by treating them as a "holy" treat to be revered and enjoyed almost never.

Sprite

[XtrPickels]

The article is very much aimed at someone who is trying to lose weight, and who is either sedentary or doing low-impact cardio as part of that effort -- something which has been proven over the years to be either ineffective or actively counterproductive. (i.e. "45 minutes on the elliptical, now I'm going to go get a smoothie!" which contains more calories than you burned.)

It is absolutely true that specific sports and activities require specific skills and strengths. I don't pretend to know everything that is involved in that, and I'm sure you know more than I do.

To ask a sedentary person to do high intensity intervals is asking for trouble. They will not have the ability to do them in a volume (even though it can be lower than steady state) that is truly conducive to weight loss. Additionally, medical complications are more common.

If I were you I would add in a quick "If your doctor approves...".

If someone is going to workout 4 days per week.... I see it as 2 hard and 2 easy. An untrained individual cannot give 4 quality days per week for very long. Heck, world class athletes do not do that many hard workouts per week. If they do... everything just becomes "moderate" as you accumulate too much fatigue to truly go "hard".... it may feel like you're working hard.... but the work output has diminished... which is the biggest problem with constant high intensity training.

Good job on trying to piece everything together Spats. Its a large undertaking.

[Dantheman]

I, personally, have some issues including low level UC (see my thread in gimp central: )

Damn Pickles, I hadn't seen that. Good luck.

[hafilax]

As for crossfit trends, The Zone is out because people are realizing that it's complete bullshit and Paleo is in because it's really easy to describe, easy to follow and shows good results with the least amount of effort.

IMO the advantages of Paleo are:
-it eliminates a lot of common food sensitivities (wheat, soy, dairy)
-it eliminates a lot of calorie dense foods
-the lower energy dense foods must be eaten in greater volume
-the high fat content keeps you full
-eliminates processed foods

I feel like the hype about leaky gut, poisonous gluten and legumes, and insulin spiking dairy to be fear mongering which is effective for people who really can't control their diet on their own. They need to fear the consequences of a loaf of bread. For the rest of the population I think that moderation is possible.

Guess I'll spend my free time today looking for papers on the perils of wheat.

When I say I've been eating strict Paleo I mean absolutely no grains, dairy (even butter) although I've been pushing the envelope in the legume department with snap peas, peas and green beans. The only prepared condiment has been dijon mustard.

The successes:
-Cottage Pie with sweet potato
-tomato-meat sauce with elk sausage and ground beef on spaghetti squash
-scrambled eggs with basil and sundried tomatoes
-pork tenderloin cooked in a dutch oven (oven was broken so stove top was necessary) with a pan sauce made with plain apple sauce salt and pepper

The failures:
-baking with almond meal
-beef stew without soup stock (I don't have time to make my own)
-mayonnaise (the cheap olive oil I have is disgusting and has a nasty bitter aftertaste; I'm sure it can be good but it doesn't keep very long)

The crux of it is that I don't have time to prepare sauces for every meal that will last only a few days or must be frozen and thawed. AND I HATE COCONUT. Adding butter will make a huge difference and cheese will open up a whole other dimension.

[DasBlunt]

great article, but one question.

Region played the biggest part in paelo diet. Why no mention of that in the otherwise well thought out article?

[jfost]

^ I think regional differences are somewhat moot now, in that we KNOW what the "good" parts of each diet are and can obtain those things regardless of location. Also, not many of us are living in our "natural" evolutionary zone... an example is people eating ocean fish in non-coastal regions.

[BurnHard]

in that we KNOW what the "good" parts of each diet are

Do we?

There's a lot of new research disproving the saturated fats & cholesterol myths, there's a lot of research pointing to sugar leading to inflammation/CVD and diabetes, and a lot of research pointing to benefits of a myriad other nutrients (fish oil, antioxidants, phytonutrients, etc, etc, etc). I personally try to adhere to a lifestyle that accommodates most of this new research and the Paleo principles.

Yet there's still SO MUCH we don't know, so much we don't understand, and so many scientists who shouldn't be scientists and still confuse correlation and causation...

Just saying, we don't know nearly as much as we think we do about the human body and nutrition. What parts of each diet may be "good" is also very relative to goals - a higher fat lower carb diet may lead to improvements in certain aspects of health, but could (purely theoretically) lead to diminishing brain sizes over centuries or millenia. We just don't know *everything* yet...

[DasBlunt]

^ I think regional differences are somewhat moot now, in that we KNOW what the "good" parts of each diet are and can obtain those things regardless of location. Also, not many of us are living in our "natural" evolutionary zone... an example is people eating ocean fish in non-coastal regions.

Makes sense. I was more concerned with regional variations and how that fact might relate to body type and then taking that to the level of eating for body type.

[XtrPickels]

great article, but one question.

Region played the biggest part in paelo diet. Why no mention of that in the otherwise well thought out article?

In the whole scheme of things the paleo diet really isn't absolutely reflective of what exactly paleolithic people ate. Its about more getting back to foods which the body has evolved eating.

In terms of locational differences, we're all so damn cross bread (ha!) that any specific regional adaptions are most likely long lost.

I console myself by saying that if a paleolithic person came across some brownies... they'd stuff themselves just like I do.

DTM- Thanks for the thoughts.

[concretejungle]

I refuse to listen to any diet thread where Tip has posted more than twice.

Also, there was some skimming and scanning and I saw "no beer." No fucking dice.

[Spats]

[quote=XtrPickels;3158634]To ask a sedentary person to do high intensity intervals is asking for trouble. They will not have the ability to do them in a volume (even though it can be lower than steady state) that is truly conducive to weight loss.]/QUOTE]

That's where we disagree. Calories burned via aerobic output in a normal 'exercise program' are rounding error to calories burned by muscle building and changes in underlying metabolic rate. (Note: I'm not talking about going out and BC skiing all day, I'm talking about 45 minutes on the elliptical.)

For instance:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...?dopt=Abstract
hGH elevated for 90-120 minutes, peaks up to 450% of baseline, after a 30 second all-out sprint! There's your anabolism and fat loss, right there.

Furthermore:

Wideman L, Weltman JY, Hartman ML, Veldhuis JD, Weltman A. Growth hormone release during acute and chronic aerobic and resistance exercise: recent findings. Sports Med. 2002;32(15):987-1004.

“Following the increase in GH secretion associated with a bout of aerobic exercise, GH release transiently decreases. As a result, 24-hour integrated GH concentrations are not usually elevated by a single bout of exercise. However, repeated bouts of aerobic exercise within a 24-hour period result in increased 24-hour integrated GH concentrations.”

If someone is going to workout 4 days per week.... I see it as 2 hard and 2 easy. An untrained individual cannot give 4 quality days per week for very long. Heck, world class athletes do not do that many hard workouts per week. If they do... everything just becomes "moderate" as you accumulate too much fatigue to truly go "hard".... it may feel like you're working hard.... but the work output has diminished... which is the biggest problem with constant high intensity training.

Good job on trying to piece everything together Spats. Its a large undertaking.

Thanks. I spend a lot of time on this stuff, and none of it involves reading anyone's book. Most of it is spent following references on Medline, Google Scholar, and whatnot.

I agree with you on goal-directed training, most obviously including weight training. If you're burning your arms out (for example), there's no point in burning them again before at least three days pass.

But anyone can do two or three 5-minute interval sprints a day. And as far as I can tell, three 30-second sprints will boost anabolism (therefore raising resting metabolism) more than any amount of low-effort 'cardio'.

[Spats]

In the whole scheme of things the paleo diet really isn't absolutely reflective of what exactly paleolithic people ate. Its about more getting back to foods which the body has evolved eating.

Exactly. None of the plants that Paleolithic people ate are found in a supermarket, because no one would buy crabapples or ancestral bananas. And much of the meat we ate is from animals that we hunted to extinction.

That's why it's more about staying away from things we DEFINITELY didn't eat (cereal grains, legumes, seed oils) than trying to exactly recreate what we did eat.

In terms of locational differences, we're all so damn cross bread (ha!) that any specific regional adaptions are most likely long lost.

That's not true AFAIK. Prevalence of lactose intolerance varies from <10% in Europeans to 100% in Native Americans. Prevalence of HLA-B8 and other HLAs related to celiac is also very unevenly distributed. And tests for a single gluten antibody give results from <0.5% to 15% of the population, depending on the population studied.

[iceman]

What about alcohol?

Bad for you. Hand it over.

[abraham]

Why do you say corn has less issues than wheat? Haven't people been eating wheat much longer than corn, especially those of you with no ancestry in the Americas? Im pretty curious about this stuff but i like baking too much to cut my wheat significantly. Any suggestions, i suppose corn based bread can be done done and maybe dark ryes.

[iceman]

Here's a suggestion that often seems to fall by the wayside but somehow always manages to come back in favor after a while: Moderation.

[pointedem]

funny stuff there. My favorites:

Eat more meat. If it’s not meat, it’s not a meal.
But remember that fatty meat is always your primary source of calories.
They’re made from seeds, and they’re extracted using poisonous organic solvents (hexane)
Learn to drink water