health

 My answers to the ten most common question I get about paleo in 140 characters or less for Twitter:

What does it mean to eat paleo?
Eat simply: meat, seafood, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Oh, and learn to love fat!

Why paleo?

Grains/sugar/legumes/seeds/dairy are new foods and not part of our evolutionary continuum and eating them causes diseases of "civilization"

How did you get started with paleo?

I had serious stomach problems and prescribed medicine didn't work. Found paleo by researching on Google and decided to try it. It worked!

Isn't your diet bad for the environment?

Industrial agriculture is unsustainable for pork OR corn, perennial grass ecosystems are the only truly sustainable way to produce food.

What are the health effects of eating paleo?

No more stomach problems, lost weight, less acne, no headaches, more energy, better mood, stronger hair and nails, milder periods+++

Is the paleo diet a masculine diet?

Paleo is for men AND women. But it does a particularly good job of supporting male nutritional needs for better performance in all things :)

What are the benefits for women?

Paleo is the ideal fuel for women to support hormonal health, fertility, and if they want to...pregnancy!

Does paleo involve eating lots of meat?

Americans already eat lots of meat. Paleo means higher quality meat with more fat and better fat.

Is paleo a temporary diet or something you can do forever?

Paleo is not a crash diet. It's a lifestyle with lifelong benefits and most people are in for the long haul. 

Isn't it difficult to have a real life when eating paleo?
Nope. Its not like meat, vegetables, fruits, and nuts are rare foods! Just hold the bread and sugar please!

Bonus: How do you know what ancient people ate?

Archeologists find bones of butchered animals, but the bones of humans provide evidence as well. Isotopes show the mark of meat and seafood.
What are your questions and answers?

I hear it all the time: why not just eat a diet like the Okinawans, the healthiest and longest lived people in the world? Traditionally they ate rice, tofu, and almost no meat! Unfortunately after WWII Americans introduced bad foods like pork and now disease rates are increasing.

That's the conventional narrative at least. Honestly, I'm not sure about the Okinawan diet. Most of the people discussing it are Americans with some sort of ax to grind. I would love to hear some Okinawan voices tell us what they actually ate, but those are few and far between. 

Americanized nonsense "Okinawan Diet"

The picture that is painted from the actual studies available is pretty murky, but shows that what is being promoted as an Okinawan diet is cultural misappropriation for profit, with American nutritionists making $$$ passing off what ends up being a Mediterranean diet with rice as the secrets of Okinawan elders. 

The real traditional diet seemed to consist of yams, goat, pork, tofu, seaweed, and seafood harvested from the island. It seems like it was pretty similar to the diet of Kitava. After the devastation of World War II, importation of food increased and oils, sugar, flour, white rice, and other processed foods became staples. The narrative of fat consumption increase only takes statistics starting from World War II, so we really don't have much of an idea of how much fat was in the traditional diet.

We do know the the consumption of traditional foods like raw goat, yams, and seaweed decreased dramatically. Also, that domestic meat production didn't really change much after WWII and much of that increase was probably recovery from devastation of the war.  The increase of meat consumption came mostly from imported animals that were probably factory-farmed...or SPAM, which is now hugely popular there.  

It does seem that their traditional diet was high in carbohydrates from yams, but its nonsense make up an Okinawan Diet plan including foods that are nothing like what pre-WWII Okinawans consumed such as whole grain bread, olive oil,  soy milk, apples, and yogurt. The traditional Okinawan diet doesn't seem to be far from my own paleo diet, except for the soy . Fortunately, the harmful effects of that can be mitigated by fermentation. I occasionally consume some fermented soy since I am an Asian food enthusiast and I adore the taste of miso and ssämjang. Yam are controversial on the paleo diet, but personally I enjoy them without ill effects. I would say my own paleo diet is heavily influenced by Japanese cuisine and benefits from it tremendously. I could never tolerate a diet of just eggs and ground meat...I'm too much of a foodie and an omnivore for that!

Here is a recent paper on the importance of the yam, kombu, and pork offal in Okinawa. Paleo dieters could definitely benefit from the consumption of kombu, which is rich in iodine, and pork offal (feet, ears, blood, intestines), which is delicious and contains many important nutrients. The problem with this paper is that they assume that people threw away pork fat...I don't know of any agrarian culture that exhibits that kind of waste. They say akunuki is removal of fat, but it also seems to mean removal of astringent taste.  

Speaking of Japan, I was just reading this editorial by Swedish scientist Uffe Ravnskov:

 In a study of Japanese migrants in the United States the cultural upbringing was the strongest predictor of coronary heart disease. Those who were brought up in a non-Japanese fashion but preferred the lean Japanese food had a heart attack almost twice as often as those who were brought up in the Japanese way but preferred fatty American food.⁴

I think it's possible that the issue here was that they thought fat wasn't traditional for Japan, but it sheds light on the fact that fat doesn't seem to cause heat disease. 

Gene Expression has a facinating post on the transition from foraging to agriculture and how it affected human welfare. The graph Razib drew is interesting:

Thinking about it in a dietary context, I added a green line. Of course it is a rough approxamation. It would certainly be interesting to do a really well-researched version of this graph taking into account the archeological evidence, but this graph does show some important things. We in the modern era (well, some of us in 1st world countries at least) are lucky in many ways, as mortality is pretty much lower than its ever been. We don't have to worry very much about ourselves and our children getting felled by a random infection or being eaten by wild animals. But the so-called diseases of civilization really keep us from living up to our full genetic potential.

Where on this timeline do you want to eat? There are actually several good choices that seem to allow one to avoid diseases of civilization.

• The paleolithic diet, emulating hunter-gatherers.
• The mesolithic diet, emulating peoples who would have eaten small amounts of agricultural products, but also would have supplemented with wild foods. I think some diets that are similar to this would be the acorn-based diets of some Native west coast cultures or the reindeer-herding Sami. Many foraging cultures that survived beyond the paleolithic, don't really eat a diet that would be considered paleolithic. Reliance on nuts as a major food source, for example, seems to start after the paleolithic period.
• and traditional nutrition, which emulates the diet of healthy peasant societies. The modern Weston A. Price society aims for this diet.

I suppose it all depends on that dotted line from this graph on Demeter's Legacy. Certainly, there are both cultural (soaking and fermenting grains) and genetic adaptations that make agricultural food less harmful to humans. Eliminating the basic poisons of the Industrial Revolution like refined sugars and grains is often enough to restore health. I suppose it is up to you as an individual to decide if you are experiencing maladaptation from an agricultural diet. The cause of maladaption could be genetic, but it also could be that the illnesses developed on an inappropriate diet require going back to the basics. I feel that is certainly the case for me.