Quote from: greyhawk on June 25, 2013, 08:23:41 PM

Quote from: Portnoy on June 25, 2013, 07:26:23 PM

Quote from: greyhawk on June 25, 2013, 06:15:58 PM

Paleo diet. It's a fad.

Wanna lose weight? Lift heavy, run hard, eat natural, sleep well, ignore Internet fads.

High-fat/low-carb 'is' natural. Look at the traditional diets of the Inuit ( fat from seal and caribou );
Plains Indian ( buffalo and deer fat made into pemmican* ) and West Coast Indians ( candle fish grease );
Masai ( Cow fat and cow blood ), and many other traditional cultures.
That is why it is called things like the Paleolithic/Caveman/Hunter-gatherer diet.

* Like the Inuit(Eskimo) they gave most of the meat to their dogs, but dried some of it.

Fat is where it is at. We are not what we eat anymore than cars are made out of gasoline. Wink

I know the selective science going into paleo and its focus on native americans. It is completely ignoring the thousands of years maize/corn was a staple food of Woodland Indians and how they extensively farmed and cultivated maize and potatoes. It is also ignoring how this more stable food supply led to the Woodland Indians being more healthy and thus more "fruitful in multiplying."

I concur that the low-fat high-carb model as such is flawed and there is a dire need to generally reduce carb content especially in prepared foods (with HFCS being the main culprit).

The Paleo Diet however is just one of many variants of high protein high fat diets we have seen in the last two decades (from Atkins to Metabolic Diet to Anabolic Diet to I'm forgetting a lot of these). Paleo is currently "in", which is why I named it a "fad". In a year or two you will have another variant of high protein high fat being proposed under a new name. I've seen it happen often enough.

Well I don't know about the Paleo Diet in particular. I am talking about high-fat/low-carb in general.

Of course one can use grains etc. to give one sugars to fuel ones body, but it may not be ideal for everyone and high-fat/low-carb may be better for many if not most people. The fact that the body doesn't seem to be designed to store much sugars as fuel ( which is why marathon runners and other high performance athletes need to keep taking it to avoid slamming into the wall ) and that the body readily stores fat that it doesn't immediately burn seems to suggest it is the bodies preferred fuel source. Even an athlete with a lean body ( ~ 10% body fat ) still has lots of fat stores to maintain high performance over a long period of time. More and more very high performance athletes ( e.g. ultra-marathoners ) seem to be getting into high-fat/low-carb diets.

About agriculture and what it has done for our health over time... here is another article worth pondering:

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html

And again let me reiterate my point from my last post, that I am not suggesting what is the right diet for anyone else.
Like with money ( to perhaps bring in a bit of topical relevance for what this forum is about Wink

)
I feel it is best for each person to take responsibility and action for ones own well-being.