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Thanks for the information. Although I haven't read it, I'm familiar with the topics covered by Good Calories, Bad Calories, and feel that the points it brings up have good support among people who care about the scientific method.
The two pages on Mark Sisson's website that you linked to only claimed that saturated fat isn't bad; I can agree with that, but what I'm really interested in is why you seem to feel that they are especially healthful. It doesn't seem like he claims that.
Well he tends to emphasize that the key to healthy eating is to minimize refined carbohydrate intake and he recommends a protein intake in the range of 0.7-1.0g per lb of lean body mass so fat intake is in part driven by the need to make up the rest of your target calorie intake. Saturated fat seems to be the a fairly healthy way to make up the calorie deficit given the options.
That a much less dramatic claim than it sounded like you were making at first, which is good for me, since it doesn't make me feel obliged to add animal fat to my diet.
I do eat a lot of fat, though mostly unsaturated (nuts and avocado). I also eat a lot of carbs, but I try to eat almost no refined carbohydrates; your example of beans and rice amuses me because brown rice and beans are a significant portion of my diet.
I think beans and rice was actually jimmy's example but yeah, rice is pretty horrendous health wise, brown or not. The jury's still out on beans from what I've read. You can't easily match the calorie intake from grains without upping your fat intake though since you need to eat a hell of a lot of green vegetables to match the caloric value of grains.
Sorry about the confusion.
I've been told by dozens of people that rice is "pretty horrendous" health-wise, and I've looked into it a bit myself. The signal-to-noise ratio is really low on this issue, so I keep running into very unscientific claims. The closest I've come to good evidence for that proposition is weak but scientific evidence that glucose intake (as part of starch) needs to be balanced with fiber intake, and that foods like rice must be balanced with foods that are almost entirely fiber (and have virtually no calories).
Would you please link me to more good arguments against consuming all starches, not just refined carbohydrates?
[EDIT: replaced fructose with glucose]
A couple of Mark Sisson's articles on grains. I'm not linking to this site because it is the most rigorous or most scientifically unassailable source for nutrition information but simply because it's easy for me to find reasonable summaries there. Good Calories, Bad Calories would be my recommendation if you want exhaustive references to the studies that many of these claims derive from. Googling for 'paleo diet' or 'paleolithic diet' should turn up a bunch more information as well.
I don't really take Mark Sisson seriously. He makes a lot of claims that can be backed up specifically, but he usually doesn't do the leg work to back them up, and he's made enough claims that I know to be verifiably false that I usually just ignore him[1]. He does suggest cutting grains of all kinds from our diet, but many of the problems he cites (insulin spikes) are remarkably different for different grains.
Google Books seems to have most of Good Calories, Bad Calories; searching within the book, there are 30 instances of the word rice; every one of those is either a quotation or Taubes specifically distinguishes between brown and white rice; in several places he implies that brown rice doesn't cause the problems that white rice does.
All this is adding together to reinforce my degree of confidence in considering brown rice an acceptable food.
[1] In the second article of his you linked to, he links to the pop-science coverage of an unpublished paper, cites their reported findings, and then outright not only dismisses but outright contradicts their conclusions with his own personal interpretation of what he wants their findings to mean.
I believe brown rice has a lower glycemic index and glycemic load than white rice and it doesn't have some of the other negatives of grains like wheat (gluten for example). It's still high in carbs and low in nutrients relative to vegetables. It's probably one of the least bad grains but it's still something I prefer to avoid. Rice was pretty easy for me to give up anyway though, I never much liked it. The only thing I really miss is sushi / sushi rolls but I can still eat as much sashimi as I like so it's not too bad.
I also consider the "paleo diet" somewhat silly, not because I think there's a good reason for it not to be healthy, but because I think of it as impractical; how many of our modern fruits and vegetables, or even meats, closely resemble what we had available to eat more than 10kya? How many paleo practitioners will seriously evaluate making terrestrial arthropods a significant portion of their diet?
However, Evolutionary Health Promotion: A Consideration of Common Counterarguments so far seems to be the best argument I've found against brown rice, since it compares a Paleolithic diet against a Mediterranean diet, which contains quantities of unrefined grains, and finds moderate improvements for the former.
This seems to be rather an extreme case of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Sure there are differences between modern fruits, vegetables and meats and the pre-agricultural versions but they are a lot more similar to the pre-agricultural diet than grains or vegetable oils. Most paleo diet variants advocate trying to source foods that more closely match pre-agricultural staples - wild salmon, grass-fed beef, wild game, etc. - but I haven't seen much direct evidence of the benefits of that approach (although you can make inferences based on other evidence).
Anyway, I think diet may be one of those things where there is a big risk of other optimizing and I think it is quite likely that there is no one size fits all diet that is suitable for everyone (due to different genetic heritages and tolerances for things like gluten, dairy, etc.). It's an excellent place to apply some self-experimentation to see what works for you.
Paleo-type diets have worked well for me because they correspond closely to the kinds of foods I like to eat anyway and a major factor in the success of any diet is how 'deprived' you feel by the restrictions placed on what you can eat. YMMV but I think most people can probably benefit from eating fewer processed carbohydrates and sugar and more fruits and vegetables.
What's the name of the bias of judging messages based on the messenger? I suspect part of my problem is that everyone I've personally met who advocated the paleo diet was also into homeopathy and crystal healing, and didn't actually have any idea what paleolithic humans really ate.
The fact that we eat different things from our evolutionary ancestors should generate hypotheses about how dietary differences affect our health; two of the biggest changes to my mind would be a dramatic increase in starch consumption and an even larger increase in cooked versus raw food. However, I haven't seen evidence that either of those is specifically a negative change, whereas increase in sugar consumption has been conclusively shown to be a big dietary evil.
One of the reasons I'm so active on this sub-thread is that dietary changes over the past two years have made huge differences in my day-to-day life, but I feel like I could still do better. However, I'm not eager to abandon cooking my food, to start eating mammals, or to stop eating all grains, so I want to hear convincing evidence to do those type of things before I'm willing to self-experiment with them. Your point that I should perhaps not try those anyway (because of feeling too restricted) is well taken.
I'm sure someone has discussed that here before .. the source heuristic? attribution/authority bias?
Interesting. Most of the new age types I have met are into vegetarianism.
I discovered the paleolithic diet in the late 90's through this wonderful website devoted to it which I can no longer find. It presented a very convincing scientific case.
Humans evolved as opportunistic omnivores. Our bodies can run efficiently on a wide variety of diets. But nonetheless they are tuned to a certain range of conditions, and as you stray from that range random failures accumulate.
We changed suddenly in the shift to agriculture, and the archeological record shows that our bodies suffered - the move from meat rich paleolithic hunter-gatherer diets to neolithic agricultural diets is associated with a marked decrease in average height and overall ill-health. If I remember correctly, the average male european height was around 6'2"" 10k yrs ago, declined by half a foot in the neolithic age, and still has not fully recovered.
The evidence is also more specific. In every case where we have good specific evidence for biochemical problems in the diet, those problems are caused by dietary novelties. Examples: glycemic load, omega fatty acid profiles, potassium/sodium levels, nutrient load, etc - all of these are solved by the paleolithic diet.
So the real question is now that we have discovered all of these issues with the modern diet, how many other issues remain that we have yet to discover?
Starch turns into sugar near immediately - your saliva can almost do the job itself, but the transformation completes quickly in the stomach. You should look at a piece of bread and instead see a mound of sugar. Actually, the bread is more sugarey than table sugar - it converts more quickly into pure glucose from what I recall.
Starch is the staple of the neolithic agricultural revolution. Cheap energy for the masses. It works, and typical humans as of today already have adapted significantly, but not nearly as much as we should. These cheap fuels lessen our lifespan. Some specific humans have not had nearly as much time to adapt - some native american tribes in particular - and they react in a spectacularly poor fashion on modern diets.
You also mention cooking, but this is not a new neolithic change. There is some debate, but general consensus is that cooking has been around for much longer than 10k yrs, and we have had more time to adapt to it. Nonetheless, overcooked food has specific problems - mainly carcinogens.
I'm not sure what the name of the bias is but I'd have probably had the same reaction as you if I'd seen the paleo diet associated with homeopathy or crystal healing. My impression is that it is over-represented in the contrarian cluster that is over-represented on LessWrong (atheist, libertarian, software engineer, not given to an interest in homeopathy or crystal healing) but that might just be some kind of selection bias on my part. I tend to associate raw-food / vegan eating with the nutty new-age fringe and have the same kind of negative associations with those diets as you describe for that reason.
I would imagine you could get pretty close to a paleo type diet without stopping cooking your food or eating mammals if you are ok with eating fish / seafood, eggs and cheese / dairy. It's pretty difficult to do it without cutting out grains however. I didn't find that too difficult (well, except beer) because I could always take or leave bread / rice / pasta anyway but I've heard from people who really enjoyed those foods that after a (sometimes difficult) period of adjustment they adapted to a grain free diet quite well.