indigenous

With most big proponents of the paleo diet being male and the general taboo against this subject, it's not surprising that menstruation and the paleo diet is little discussed. That's a shame, because the beneficial effects of the paleo diet on menstruation is one of the main reasons I keep to the diet. 

In most of the modern world, getting your period is a pain. It can last as long as a week and be accompanied by all manners of maladies ranging from irritability to stomach upset. Young women are getting their period earlier and earlier, at the ages of 11 and 12. This has been tied to disease later in life.

It's hard to know what menstruation was like in the paleolithic, but the modern hunter-gatherers studied provide some insight. Foragers, and most women in the rest of the world, get their period around 16. That makes sense because if women started earlier it might make for risky pregnancies. In Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, menstruation is described as a "thing of no account." It's the conventional narrative that menstruation would have been rare for hunter-gatherers, but this is not true. It would have been less because of breast feeding and pregnancy, but still part of the female experience.

This excellent article about that myth talks about how sometimes !Kung women will have periods but will have not released an egg. It also talks about the myth that exercise causes amenorrhea

I learned, by studying runners, what is true for all women - ovulation and menstruation are not the same. Regular periods can and do occur with no ovulation or with disturbed ovulation[8,13,14]. However, like most doctors (and consequently, ordinary women), Is Menstruation Obsolete? implies that periods mean ovulation. It also infers that amenorrhea is (just) anovulation. In fact, amenorrhea means both estrogen and progesterone levels are low-a situation that always causes fast bone loss and the risk for osteoporosis.

 

She contrasts low fertility caused by living an active and natural life, with the Western illness of amenorrhea, which seems to be unrelated to those things. 

My own experience is that prior to starting the paleo diet, I had very heavy periods lasting as long as a week and accompanied by irritability, stomach sickness, and headaches. After I had been on the paleo diet for awhile, my periods became shorter, lighter, and easier. The times I have gone off the paleo diet and had bad periods again have been a huge incentive to stick with the diet. 

Why are my periods so much better now? Well, the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 has been linked to PMS. The reduction in body fat also probably decreased the length of my period. 

The problems with modern periods can be linked to various modern habits from contraceptive pills to environmental toxins to delayed childbirth. However, it's clear that appropriate nutrition plays a role. 

Edit:

Some women have reported amenorrhea on the paleo diet. The causes of amenorrhea seem to be varied and some are serious, so a visit to a doctor might be in order. 

 It's too bad my parents didn't know what I know now. What I know is that children and humans in general don't need vegetables to be healthy. ALL the nutrients in vegetables are present in meat and are more bioavailable in meat. While I enjoy eating vegetables myself, I now know that it's unnecessary to force them down the throats of children who are only following their humans instincts to avoid bitter-tasting foods (though the sensitivity varies from person to person and is genetic), which in the wild were often poisonous. That instinct, that kept generations of our ancestors alive, is now something to be punished. Parents spend untold amounts of time trying to force vegetables on their children and on cookbooks purporting to be able to get children to eat vegetables. Some kids love vegetables and it's great if they do, but it's not a tragedy if they don't.

Why? Plenty of people eat nothing but meat and don't suffer from obesity or other diseases parents warn their children they will get if they don't eat broccoli. If anything, parents should encourage their children to eat fat, which luckily most children instinctually like. Looking back at my childhood, I definitely did suffer from sicknesses all the time. My family blamed it on the fact I didn't eat vegetables, rather than my love for biscuits, crackers, and other processed goo. By some miracle I always had shiny hair and glowing skin though, which is probably because I did love fat. I especially always loved chicken skin. It wasn't until I started eating things like Kashi cereal and Nutrigrain bars and less fat that I had problems with weight gain, acne, and hair loss. I traded one type of stomach problem for another. 

So encourage kids to eat fat and don't worry if they don't love spinach. The sugar conundrum is a more difficult one, since sugar is a pervasive food in kiddie culture from birthday parties to school lunches. A few weeks ago I was walking down the street and saw a man pushing a stroller. His kid was merrily chewing on some candy and was holding a large bag of it. They pulled alongside another woman pushing a stroller and the man said loudly "Hey, want some gummy bears." The woman looked at him angrily and said "No, my daughter is allergic." I guess that's one strategy...

If you want to see some beautiful photos of traditional fish eating in a Gwich'in camp, look here, though keep in mind that at the time these pictures were taken, this tribe was eating modern foods.

Lately health blogger Matt Stone has been creating a bit of a controversy in paleo circles by blaming thyroid issues on low carbing. There is no question that many long term low carbers and paleo dieters suffer from thyroid issues . Why? Arctic cultures like the Inuit, Koyoukon, Yupik, Sami, and many others have a traditional diet that is very low in carbohydrates. Many people have written about how healthy they are despite following a diet that's not exactly the USDA food pyramid. 

I think it's pretty clear that the problems people are having are not due to a lack of cornbread. What all the healthy arctic people had in common was that they consumed a wealth of marine foods ranging from seal liver to seaweed. Marine foods have nutrients all of us could benefit from. Traditional cultures not only ate fish, they ate whole fish: fish eyes, liver, and bones. This stuff is a hard sell to those of us who grew up eating the typical American diet, but it's definitely worth getting used to eating, as the arctic explorers did. 

Arctic explorer and low carb idol Vilhjalmur Stefansson forced himself to like fish, as he recounts in his interesting book online:

Until I was twenty seven I had the belief about myself that I could not eat fish and felt certain that its taste was obnoxious to me. I thought it an interesting peculiarity and assumed that everyone else would think so and there were few things I told about so often as the fact that I was peculiar in that I could not eat fish. I think I might have lost the notion sooner if it had not formed such an excellent topic of conversation 

I've said it many times: if your paleo or low carb diet is a bunch of ground meat and some chicken breasts, you probably need to rethink things. As far as the carb controversy, it's a rather old one. The Weston A. Price Foundation has been criticizing the paleo diet for not including traditional dairy and fermented grain/legume products. In his books food ecologist Gary Nabhan recounts how Native American tribes like the Pima never suffered from obesity on their traditional high carb diet.  Born To Run recounts the impressive athletic fears of the corn-loving Tarahumara tribe. The yam eating Kitavans don't have too many problems either. 

But the paleo diet is about more than just not being obese. Plenty of people follow it to heal from autoimmune conditions and damage from eating the Standard American Diet. Others follow it to improve athletic performance. The truth is that while traditional agrarian cultures didn't have type II diabetes epidemics, the healthiest bones that anthropologists have found were those of coastal foragers. As Dr. Kurt Harris says "tolerated is not optimal."

The Fast Runner trilogy is available free online. The films are made by Inuits and for Inuits and are a great window into a way of life that few of us are truly aware of beyond "Eskimo" stereotypes. 

"All animal carcasses shown in the film were used properly, for food or for their hides." The Inuit have been devastated by Western foods, but remain relatively healthy compared to other First Nations tribes like the Pima in the US, probably because hunting traditions still persist. But they have to fight to keep their lifestyle and foodways legal in the face of Western opposition to hunting. 

The Inuit are often used as an example of people thriving on a diet consisting mostly of animal flesh.