Two Philosophies

I never considered Art to be a godfather of Paleo, he is just a godfather to himself. I dropped his site after he continued to spread the lie that Atkins died of heart disease and that even if he did hit his head on some steps from a slip on city ice, it would never have happened to me because I'm nimble, this from a guy living in ice free Southern Calf. And I get better results lifting weights with Dan John than with his ideas.

“A greater reliance on fatty acids for fuel, along with the ability to conserve and replenish muscle glycogen, offered a distinct survival advantage as it allowed our Paleolithic ancestors to work (i.e., hunt and gather) longer and more often” –Loretta DiPietro, PhD, MPH

I agree with that statement! We ideally want to be able to use as a wide a variation of food as possible AS LONG AS our health and performance does not go downhill.

The only way to know for sure is to try it out yourself. Eac person will vary from their neighbor.

I have not followed Art stuff for awhile, but I when I did I loved some of his ideas one week and then the next week I could not figure out where the following idea came from!

Rock on
Mike T Nelson PhD(c)

I can't get his book on kindle it says available on the 21 December, am I looking at the right book?

In my humble opinion, the definitive book on paleo diet, based in part on the findings of Weston Price, is "The Wellness Project."

Emily, it might well be that grass-fed is a far more important concept than we know (or guess).

I live in Finland and actually in eastern Finland, the exact place where heart ischaemic disease was probably one of the most rampant in the world after World War II. North Karelia was actually the main example of saturated fat & IHD connection in the famous (and otherwise bad) seven countries study by Ancel Keys. Then became the messianic North Carelia Project, hoorah, which supposedly saved us by limiting safa, tobacco and salt + exercise.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1341917/

Recently anthropologists also have asserted that finnish people have been among the very last hunter-gatherers in Europe. No horticultural crap, just plain gathering and (look at the map, we live just as north as canadian inuit communities!) tons of hunting and fishing. Of course the temperature was a couple of degrees higher than now but not too much to really matter. There is evidence that some Swedish people (just slightly south from here) even took agriculture and then stopped it for hundreds of years for some reason(s).

I'm not easily bought by half baked theories on IHD not having anything to do with animal fat SOURCES.

Costa Rican farmers had a stunning negative correlation with CLA intake and IHD. Natural CLA is one hot thing in pastured butter, K2 may be another. Getting CLA from butter is simple, just let them eat fresh grass. If there IS grass.

Mexicans had similar safa consumption as we had, yet just a tiny fraction of IHD. In Finland, one could say that having around 4 months of time to let cows eat grass is a lot less than in Costa Rica, no ? How about (unresearched yet biologically somewhat plausible) K2 status and obvious Vit D content ? Exactly.

Inuits always had far less safa and far more omega 3 than finnish agriculturalists ever had in their very short (around 200+ years) history. Before then, their (and my) ancestors' traditional diet was far more like the inuits, with perhaps not a whole lot of more vegetation as a caloric base.

Then there are genetic differences between populations. Safas may not be actual reason for IHD panculturally in any meaningful sense, but they may well be a mediator for lipotoxicity in a context of consuming too many (carb) calories. This has been proposed for example by a big low carb fan Dr. Michael Dansinger, who recently visited Jimmy Moore's podcast. Finnish people did the 'Inuits' by becoming alcoholics and diabetics super fast by getting excess and bad carbs like wheat (and 6-pufas) into their non-evolved systems by overnight.

Of course, safas seem in a similar position now as processed carb-crap seems to have always been since the dawn of fat debate, but safas sadly still get the most attention because of the 'plausible' mechanism of LDL toxicity. The mechanisms of carb-crap in IHD is far less clear and this may be a cause of general confusion upon GI and GK as general carb quality quantifiers, which suck anyway on many levels.

Now that Ramsden et al. has brilliantly brought to light the stupidness of simple linoleic acid centered fat politics, it is still not clear why people should eat safa more or even as much as now. It just seems that the thing is more about the sources of safa (ie palmitic acid) and some specific conditions, since getting the same calories from coconut seem not 'neutral' enough for similar exclusion exercise from a otherwise healthy diet. Omega 3 seem more obvious (and essential) good guys than ever before.

The anti-vilifying safa movement seems more like paleo-enacment to me, most of the time. Please get your animal fat as natural form as possible or just get that cold pressed coconut. I choose the coconut for now, as well as olive oil and real animals.

Here's an article about where and how the gene mutation evolved to digest lactose. This is from 7000 years ago. IMHO, if your ancestors are from northern Europe, milk is well tolerated most likely.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,723310,00.html

I haven't read Art's book but I'm disappointed to hear that he is so picky about fat, yolks etc.

One of the big reasons I jumped into paleo was because of Art and Taleb and their appreciation of the human body as a complex system and their awareness that there is no use in trying to control the minutiae.

I sometimes wonder if Taleb should dumb down his points, I've seen far too many interviews on TV in which the journalist obviously has no clue as to what he's talking about.

Great read, now what?