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

[woodstocksez]

To add a simple approach to the discussion, what harm will Paleo do. ...

...

So what harm will come of people who eat Paleo? ...

None, I hope. We're trying to eat more in that vein, which is a way I like to eat, anyway, so good for me. I hope.

[woodstocksez]

Yes, it absolutely does. Unlike all the associational bullshit we've been arguing over, this was a controlled study, with whole grain intake the only variable. (It was supposed to be 'fiber', but that 'fiber' was provided by whole grains.)

The reason associational studies come to different conclusions is that whole grain intake is ASSOCIATED with lots of other healthy behaviors. But it turns out when you control for that variable and that variable alone, those ASSOCIATIONS go away.

One might also examine the Helsinki Businessmen Study, which found that a controlled medical intervention composed of "Diet, smoking, exercise, antihypertensive drugs, cholesterol lowering drugs" produced a 46% increase in mortality...and a MORE THAN DOUBLING of heart disease!

Yes, the treatment suggested by the lipid hypothesis caused a massive increase in death rate.

Of course, you have to read the full study to see this startling fact, because it's mentioned nowhere in the abstract and danced around by the entire study. But the data remains:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...00167-0117.pdf

It's almost comical to see them hedging around the results: "The findings on 1 h blood glucose suggest that factors related to glucose tolerance explain in part the excess mortality in the intervention group compared with the control group."

Like, I don't know...eating a consistent low-fat, high-sugar diet causes problems with glucose metabolism, leading to metabolic syndrome with Type II diabetes and heart disease? Naw, must have been a problem with the study

Unsurprisingly, controlled studies on diet are not popular because they tend to produce politically inconvenient results.

OK, I was just trying to be nice before. Spats, you're really not even reasonably intelligent. You just read a lot and accumulate a bunch of information. You have pretty much no idea how to process it appropriately. For those that think this is an irrelevant tangent to the real discussion of this thread, well, OK, it's not. But I'll leave this at that. Everyone can form their own judgment (obviously) as to credibility. Buyer beware.

Edit to add ...

The last, highlighted, bit in Spats' post above is worth emphasizing, though. A very strong recurrent theme in Spats' writing is that he is a courageous crusader here to impart "the truth" that "they" don't want you to know. In considering credibility, it's worth asking why he regularly resorts to that emotional appeal.

[rather ripped]

Yes, it absolutely does.


Like, I don't know...eating a consistent low-fat, high-sugar diet causes problems with glucose metabolism, leading to metabolic syndrome with Type II diabetes and heart disease? Naw, must have been a problem with the study


Nope.

Some of the more hardcore people say "absolutely no added salt or sugar" which makes most sauces problematic. I'm personally not that strict: compared to the 13 teaspoons of sugar in one single 16oz Coca-Cola, a little bit in a sauce isn't a big deal.

Same with salt IMO. Our bodies are pretty good at metabolizing small amounts of fructose and salt...it's chronic overconsumption that causes problems. (This is distinct from frank poisons like wheat germ agglutinin, which are not nutrients in any dose.)

As I've said before, the biggest gains come from:
-Getting your n-3/n-6 under control by ditching seed oils and excessive nut consumption, and using only animal fats/coconut oil
-~2000 IU vitamin D3 supplementation and light n-3 supplementation
-Cut the sodas and fruit juices
-Going gluten-free and replacing the calories with fatty meat

Everything else is far secondary to these concerns. The Kitavans eat shitloads of tubers and are very healthy and long-lived despite a low-protein diet -- because they use lots of coconut and palm oils, don't eat plant toxins in the form of grains or beans, and spend a lot of time in the sun.

And let me emphasize again that Cordain, while instrumental in much of the research, is flat wrong about saturated fat and recommending lean meats. The numbers in his scientific papers don't even add up!
http://www.gnolls.org/715/when-the-c...initely-paleo/

I gather he's moderated his position recently, but his books still carry the old busted dogma.

We used Cordain's book to get started. It was simple and direct and we had an easy time implementing this way of eating. I would recommend it as a place to start since it is so simple.

We are still eating lean meat as a rule, especially at home. We eat a ton of fish and also supplement with Carlson or Barlean's (8 tsp per day) and it's a much better solution to arthritis than Glucosomine.

We eat SunNut butter and Almond butter mixed together as a snack - with fruit. No peanut butter or Cashew butter. We don't know what we are doing but you need to eat and this is Paleo though too high in Omeag 6. We generally avoid Gluten - this has been a break through. We saute in olive oil and coconut oil.

I say - stay the hell away from grains. Eliminate dairy - our cheat is Feta cheese, but rarely. "Why no beans" is a common question. Cordain said so?!

Guess it's time to research the fatty meat issue.

One more thing. It's exercise and diet... the exercise portion, for me, must include heavy lifting. This is way more important than cardio. I do Met-coms as well, but they also include heavy lifting. Big muscles tie it all together - not that I have big muscles.

[zion zig zag]

Alright, I just bought half a beef, how big of a freezer do I need? Also, I've heard some people say that grass-fed cooks a little different. True? How?

[Rontele]

As another affirmation of this diet, for various reasons, I ate grains and dairy this weekend and now feel like shit today

[Dantheman]

I just found these guys over the weekend http://www.utahnaturalmeat.com/ and am considering pulling the trigger on a 1/4 cow and 1/2 a pig ($3.50/lb hanging weight, seems like a pretty good deal). Here's what they recommend for freezer space:

Frequently Asked Questions


1. How much freezer space do I need for beef and chicken? A whole cow takes up about 10 cubic feet of freezer space, which equates to a half using about 5 cubic feet and a quarter about 3 cubic feet. For chicken you can store about two chickens per cubic foot. They are similar to storing a football in the freezer. They're just kind of an odd shape and take up a little more room.

[hafilax]

As another affirmation of this diet, for various reasons, I ate grains and dairy this weekend and now feel like shit today

Well I ate grains and dairy on the weekend and feel great. My N=1 is greater than your N=1!

[XXX-er]

Thank you f My first big step is to quit eating breakfast cereals such as grape nuts or any type of granola (which is so popular here in Germany) and start eating more eggs and meats at breakfast.

I been doing 1 egg every morning maybe some landyaeger sausage for the last year, I find I don't need to eat much cuz the protien satisfys so I have lost weight and I find it easy to maintain that change in diet

I DO eat the cereal either museli and/or fibre1 but I eat it at night with yogurt and what it does is keep me regular every morning

[bagtagley]

Somebody with some more knowledge may be able to give you better info, but here's what I was told in an email from Polyface.

"Freezer Space estimate on each quarter is 2 shelves of a standard upright freezer or 1- 1 1/2 48-quart coolers."

In the case of dry-cooked cuts, it's easier to overcook, but if you like your steaks/chops bloody, you wont' have a problem. The ground we get is usually in the 20-25% range, so overcooking isn't a major issue there either. I haven't had to make any adjustments for roasts or other long-cooked cuts.

[Rontele]

Well I ate grains and dairy on the weekend and feel great. My N=1 is greater than your N=1!

I usally take Saturday dinner off regardless. But this weekend was the perfect storm of shitty weather, family health issues and a stressful work environment.

[hafilax]

I usally take Saturday dinner off regardless. But this weekend was the perfect storm of shitty weather, family health issues and a stressful work environment.

Stress and sleep which are themselves correlated have a greater impact on how I feel than what I ate. IME, binging on grains is a small perturbation when compared to those two. Still, anything helps and I try to eat well.

[woodstocksez]

As another affirmation of this diet, for various reasons, I ate grains and dairy this weekend and now feel like shit today

Well I ate grains and dairy on the weekend and feel great. My N=1 is greater than your N=1!

I ate a couple of bowls of cereal two different times this weekend and felt a bit of "head dead" (not sure if that's an expression other people use or just something I"ve incorporated into my lexicon from the somewhat broken English my wife speaks) shortly thereafter. (It was pretty tasty, though.) I also ate eggs, bacon and sausage for breakfast both days and didn't feel any "head dead," though I did feel somewhat fat, probably as a consequence of the fact that I really ate a lot of food. (It was also tasty.) I believe that this data, together with that provided by Rontele and hafilax, is conclusive proof.

More seriously ...

Stress and sleep which are themselves correlated have a greater impact on how I feel than what I ate. IME, binging on grains is a small perturbation when compared to those two. Still, anything helps and I try to eat well.

Very true for me, too.

[ilikecandy]

I've given careful consideration to your thoughtful post.

????????????????

I guess I didn't express myself well. I'm saying I agree with you 100% here. And spats' response and his impulse to "rebut" specifics of content show that he doesn't understand what you're saying at all, and I think it would behoove him to.

A study that shows that people doubling their grain intake results in decreased health certainly does not support "eat more grains, die sooner"

[hafilax]

http://www.gnolls.org/715/when-the-c...initely-paleo/
Cordain most certainly has the better interpretation of the data and this blog post proves absolutely nothing.

Because subcutaneous and abdominal body fat stores are depleted during most of the year in wild animals, PUFAs and MUFAs ordinarily constitute most of the total carcass fat (11). [False: half the carcass is SFA. 47%/53% and 49%/51% equal 1/2 within the precision of their data set.]

Splitting hairs. 53% is the majority of the fat and he defines dominant as being strictly >50% in the sentence you conveniently left out. 47% is about half. You just rounded the opposite way since it suits your argument. He may be guilty of the same but it doesn't really make your case.

MUFAs and PUFAs are the dominant fats in the edible carcass of caribou for all 12 mo of the year, as illustrated in Figure 6 (11, 60-65). [False again: as shown above, there is as much SFA as MUFA and PUFA combined.]

Same as above. There is slightly less SFA.

Because of the seasonal cyclic depletion of SFAs and enrichment of PUFAs and MUFAs, [What seasonal depletion? 49% to 47% is insignificant, being well within the rounding error of the percentages they use in the table]

The table is for 1 specific animal. He references a paper which discusses the issue in detail and not just based on a single animal's fat content. I have the feeling that he's not telling the whole story and knows more about the distribution of the fat and what is eaten than what these average numbers indicate. I'm also not sure of how one can use this data for cooked meat which can lose significant amounts of fat.

a year-round dietary intake of high amounts of SFAs would have not been possible for preagricultural hominins preying on wild mammals. [False again! Even the leanest animals, in April, provide over 30% of their edible calories from fat -- and October meat provides 82% of calories from fat! This means that, on average, caribou hunters are obtaining over half their calories from fat.]

This is assuming that 100% of their calories come from game year round and that game availability is constant. Especially in northern climates with migrating herds the availability of meat would have varied by huge amounts. There is not a 1-1 correspondence between the game fat content and the percentage of fat in the diet.

If anything, Cordain probably is guilty of cherry picking the caribou as a lean meat example given that another name for Rabbit Starvation is Mal de Caribou (aka protein poisoning). Early explorers became sick from eating a diet of lean caribou and yes they ate the fat. It sounds like the dominant mechanism is the limit of how much glucose the liver can produce from protein. When dietary energy and fat stored in the body run low, the body can only produce so much glucose from protein which is barely enough to live.

Where your argument falls flat is the comparison to the grain fed cow if the page you link is representative. Sure the fat percentages are similar but the numbers say 794 out of 1125 calories are fat. 70% of the carcass energy is in fat and there are 0 seasonal fluctuations. Even though grass fed cattle are better they still have not-so-great fat profiles when you look at the details.

My interpretation of Cordain's argument is that the amount of fat available to us from commercial beef is significantly higher than what was available to HG and that the distribution of the fats is not good for us. This does mean that we shouldn't eat fat but that we shouldn't eat all that is available to us. Even lean cuts of grass fed beef will have a high fat content when compared to game in the lean seasons. Indigenous people eat all of the fat when they can but they have no more of a steady supply of fat than they do meat.

The HG would have gone through seasonal weight fluctuations as well, putting on fat when the game was fat and plentiful and losing it in the poor seasons. Animal husbandry changed all that and now we have a steady supply of fat meat from obese cows, even if they are free range and grain fed. It's not just the slabs of fat either. Feedlot meat is engineered to be marbled with loads of fat in the muscle. It is ridiculous to assume that we should eat like the HG did in the fat gaining season all the time. Even a lot of the game meats are farmed and will have a higher average fat content than their wild and hunted counterparts.

TL;DR Eat your fat but understand how much fat you're eating.

[woodstocksez]

A study that shows that people doubling their grain intake results in decreased health certainly does not support "eat more grains, die sooner"

Help me out. Are you referring to the Helsinki study mentioned above?

What do you think about the question I asked before? Is a single controlled study commonly taken as dispositive proof of a "fact" in scientific investigation (particularly one as seemingly sweeping and extravagant - to my layperson's eye - as "eating more whole grains makes you die sooner")?

How about this question: does performing a controlled study mean that you eliminate with certainty any effects/relationships/interactions other than the one you're attempting to study?

[zion zig zag]

I just found these guys over the weekend http://www.utahnaturalmeat.com/ and am considering pulling the trigger on a 1/4 cow and 1/2 a pig ($3.50/lb hanging weight, seems like a pretty good deal). Here's what they recommend for freezer space:

That's a Corriente though and they can be smaller. I was told that my half would be about 400 pounds (hanging weight). I also just saw somewhere that you can get about 35 lbs of meat per cubic foot if it's packed pretty well.

[ilikecandy]

Help me out. Are you referring to the Helsinki study mentioned above?

What do you think about the question I asked before. Is a single controlled study commonly taken as dispositive proof of a "fact" in scientific investigation (particularly one as seemingly sweeping and extravagant - to my layperson's eye - as "eating more whole grains makes you die sooner")?

How about this question: does performing a controlled study mean that you eliminate with certainty any effects/relationships/interactions other than the one you're attempting to study?

Obviously no, and those are important issues that the fanatics need to face.

But you don't even need to go that far. Salt mind I think and others are arguing that a small, but discrete, amount if grains is helpful/ideal. Using that Helsinki study to disprove that shows a major failure in logic. Spats is seeing results that may SUPPORT his point, and mistakenly thinking they prove it

edit: i'm being unclear again. my problem is not that the study is not enough to prove his point, which is true. my problem is that it seems to me to support the point he is trying to rebut at least, and probably more than, his own, i.e., that a small but DISCRETE amount of grains is a good thing

[Dantheman]

I also just saw somewhere that you can get about 35 lbs of meat per cubic foot if it's packed pretty well.

They say their whole Corrientes are typically 350-450 lbs hanging and recommend 10 cubic feet so 35lbs/cubic ft sounds about right.

[zion zig zag]

They say their whole Corrientes are typically 350-450 lbs hanging and recommend 10 cubic feet so 35lbs/cubic ft sounds about right.

I don't know how lean they are but wouldn't 400 lbs hanging yield about 250-300 pounds of meat?

[Dantheman]

Yeah, they say to plan on about 70% yield. 35 lbs/ft seems like a good planning number for freezer purchasing.

[woodstocksez]

My main assertion is that whole grains are a net positive when consumed in moderate amounts ...

A study that shows that people doubling their grain intake results in decreased health certainly does not support "eat more grains, die sooner"

... Salt mind I think and others are arguing that a small, but discrete, amount if grains is helpful/ideal. Using that Helsinki study to disprove that shows a major failure in logic. Spats is seeing results that may SUPPORT his point, and mistakenly thinking they prove it

edit: i'm being unclear again. my problem is not that the study is not enough to prove his point, which is true. my problem is that it seems to me to support the point he is trying to rebut at least, and probably more than, his own, i.e., that a small but DISCRETE amount of grains is a good thing

OK, I think I get what you're saying there at the end, and I didn't before. (I didn't see stated above what I understand you to be giving as the conclusion of the Helsinki study, and I didn't click the link to read more, but stipulating that it is ...) Is the following it? Doubling grain intake is not consumption in a moderate amount; it's excessive consumption. So, not only does that study not undermine Saltmind's contention, you could view it as suggesting support for Saltmind's contention, since excessive consumption was required to produce deleterious effects.

[bodywhomper]

i don't have the attention span to read through this entire thread right now. anybody care to comment on the big picture differences between paleo diet and the general diet promoted by the weston price foundation?

tia

[DeutschBag]

I've got a great butcher just down the road from me that I visited for the first time today. I bought 500g of ground and mixed hamburger/pork (that's very common in Germany), 10 slices of premium speck (bacon) to eat with my eggs in the morning, and 5 steak filets with the fat left on. Not sure what the cut was because I simply don't have all the meat jargon down auf Deutsch yet. I did try to ask the butcher if the beef was grass fed or ate corn and he just looked at me funny. I don't think my German was up to par, but he finally got it. He said 'of course they eat outside from the ground'. Good enough, I guess. I then asked if the cattle was injected with hormones. I got another weird look and he just shook his head and said 'it's healthier than in America and it's all local from this area'. I told him I'd be a regular customer and just lived down the way and this made him happy.

I get my blood tested regularly for my uric acid measurements for my gout. I'll ask for my cholestorol and other relevant figures the next time I go in too. Might as well keep track of that as well.

I'll report back after a week or so. So far, it's been great eating more meat! Can't wait to eat the speck tomorrow morning!

[advres]

i don't have the attention span to read through this entire thread right now. anybody care to comment on the big picture differences between paleo diet and the general diet promoted by the weston price foundation?

tia

If you can't take the time to read and gain knowledge about a certain diet, something tells me you don't have the intestinal fortitude to stick to any type of diet.

[hafilax]

Paleo: no grains, no beans, no dairy
WP: limited grains, limited beans, limited dairy
Both: Eat real food