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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.
jacob_cannell:
I've seen this claim many times from a bunch of people, but never accompanied by references to literature. Do you know what exact work it is based on, and how controversial it is in expert circles?
No. I was just recalling it from my memory, and my numbers are probably well off, but the effect seems to be widely acknowledged. It's difficult to really determine a trend like this - naturally height and bone stature can vary widely from region to region.
One summary here
some other data points from a paleo blog which show a less pronounced effect
what would be most illuminating would be to find an actual debate between paleontologists about this issue - that would probably have the highest density of info.
And on that note, other factors such as communicable diseases could also have played a role in decreasing average height and health of agriculturalists.
Be careful with things along the line of "the effect seems to be widely acknowledged", just because those effects that are are also often the ones least critically reviewed. I have also read the 6'2" height statistic, and never seen evidence that convinced me it was a reasonable average. I agree that a debate among paleontologists, especially one that completely omits mention of diet, disease or other explanatory causes, would be ideal to distill our best understanding of the facts. Then discussing diet, disease, etc. as possible explanations would move from facts to viable hypotheses.
You're not wrong...the paleo types that I've met are pretty crazy. I was hanging out with three of them a few months back (naked in a hot tub, 'natch), and all three considered themselves to be on the paleo diet, but also were raw-food only vegans, which I consider nuts, but corroborates your point about new-agers. Another that I met sometime earlier wasn't vegetarian, but was nearly as crazy as the other three.
I agree that they would be if the diet was carefully followed, but I wonder about how well people practicing the paleolithic diet actually approximate it. My biggest wonder is whether people work hard enough to eat only wild and grass-fed meats, which is necessary to balance out the omega fatty acid profile; otherwise meat is still bad for that. Nutrient load is also of interest to me, just because over the last several thousand years we've genetically engineered a lot of the nutrients out of our foods, though I suspect we haven't gone far enough for that to be a real concern.
I am also not convinced that our ancestors ate as much meat as is often claimed; present-day tribes certainly don't eat that much, even the most aggressive hunters, and many tribes subsist mostly on grubs and bugs for their protein. I'm not at all confident that too much meat is a problem in our diet, but I feel like the paleo diet is often a convenient excuse for people who want to eat a lot of meat, which is the same way I feel about Atkins. That doesn't speak to the actual worth of the diet, but it's worth keeping in mind as a potentially biasing factor.
Please stop repeating this popular myth. Glucose is a sugar, and starch is glucose, but that's very misleading. Glucose is naturally handled really well by the body, but fructose (and by extension, sucrose) is not. Sugar: The Bitter Truth is long but informative, although it has its detractors as well. However, both sources agree that glucose is just fine for you, while I don't think anybody (except lobbies, perhaps) seriously claims that table sugar isn't harmful.
I realize that cooked food has been around for a long time, but probably not long enough to induce significant evolutionary adaptations. What's really interesting to me is that animals---all primates, my dog, etc---prefer cooked food to uncooked, even if it's not a natural part of their diet.
Yes of course this is true, it can be difficult to follow. I believe in it in theory, but in practice is a whole other matter.
Yes, although vegetable oils and fried foods can be just as bad. I take fish oil supplements to help at least.
I meant 'sugarey' in terms of the principle pure metabolic form of sugar, which is glucose. This is not a myth - starch converts so easily into glucose that you should think of it as glucose. Glucose is pure true sugar as far as your body is concerned. Thus starch is more pure 'sugarey' than table sugar. Ask a diabetic about the insulin response of starch.
You are discussing additional reasons why fructose is potentially even worse than starch/glucose.
Large glucose spikes are not "just fine for you" in the long term. There is significant mounting evidence that these large insulin spikes are a novel feature of our diet that we have not had adequate time to fully adapt for. In the long term it contributes to weight gain and the metabolic syndrome set of diseases.
Naturally we have varying degrees of genetic resistance, but a reduced insulin load is just plain healthier for everyone. This is no myth.
A key feature of the paleo-diet is low overall caloric density, low glucose, and low insulin load.
I dont know about this. Some humans have significant evolutionary adaptations for grains and milk already. Cooking has been around for much longer, and we can expect significant adaptations for that. Indeed, if anything we have probably lost much of the robustness of our gut defenses as a result, but gained adaptations against potential ill-effects of cooking (carcinogens?)
Glucose does not evoke a metabolic response identical to fructose. Perhaps most importantly, glucose can be metabolized by all cells in the body, but fructose specifically stresses the liver. Quantitatively, fructose also causes much higher triglyceride and aldehyde production than an equivalent amount of glucose, and participates in glycogenesis much less efficiently; since glycogenesis is the strongest negative-feedback mechanism for dealing with excessive insulin, this ought to be a significant difference.
This is not to say that insulin spikes or high blood-glucose levels are healthful, but they can be regulated without eliminating carbohydrates from our diets. "Glucose is pure true sugar" as far as chemists are concerned, perhaps, but our body treats different sugars quite differently, and it is dangerous to conflate them.
There's also some recent evidence / claims that cooking (and meat eating) were in part responsible for the big jump in human brain size and intelligence.
Raw-food veganism and paleo type diets are pretty hard to reconcile (though probably less so than regular vegan diets and paleo type diets). There are raw food animal diets but they are quite distinct from raw food veganism and are more similar to standard paleo type diets.
This is probably the most difficult aspect of the diet to follow strictly due to the relative difficulty and expense of obtaining these types of meat and fish. That's why most of paleo type diets recommend Omega 3 supplementation and things like Omega 3 enriched eggs.
This sounds to me like being stuck in the mindset that a diet has to be about deprivation or eating foods you don't particularly enjoy. There's no reason that healthy foods can't also be foods you like to eat. As a rule it seems that foods we are evolutionarily adapted to eat are both tasty and nutritious. It's the 'super-stimuli' of refined carbs, refined sugar and processed foods which tend to fit the stereotype of 'if it tastes good it must be bad for you'.
Fructose and sucrose appear to be worse than glucose but it is false to say that glucose is naturally handled really well by the body, at least in the quantities produced by a typical western diet. Much of the harm associated with sugar and refined carbohydrate consumption appears to come from the over-stimulation of the insulin response and resulting blood sugar spikes and crashes caused by eating refined carbs and sugars. Bread is not 'more sugary' than table sugar but white bread does have a Glycemic Index that rivals table sugar.
Glucose is an important cellular fuel source and a key component of human metabolism but we are simply not well adapted to deal with the onslaught of glucose produced by consuming grains and refined sugars.
When I said that I considered a raw-food vegan paleo diet nuts, that's what I meant, that they just seem to difficult to reconcile.
My statement wasn't an argument against meat; it was cautionary, and an appropriate response is to point out that I really like eating rice and beans, and should be equally cautious about arguing for their health benefits because of the stake I have in wanting those to be healthful.
My point about bread was that a 4oz piece of bread is not as unhealthy as a 4oz piece of hard candy. I don't consider refined carbohydrates, or even unrefined but purer carbohydrates (such as potatoes) healthful. I'm having a lot of trouble finding good sources to either back me up or discredit what I'm trying to say (the video linked to earlier is one of the former), but the impression that I'm under is that starch doesn't cause harmful insulin responses or large insulin spikes if eaten in the much less pure forms; that is, even significant quantities of carbohydrates are digested slowly enough to not cause problems if they are molecularly dispersed among protein, fats, or most especially fiber, and that this is a super-linear effect, more than would be explained simply by eating less of a pure carbohydrate.
I've also heard a plausible theory that a lot of the soil that food is grown on is mineral-depleted. Manure isn't going to solve the problem if it's from animals which have been fed food grown on mineral-depleted soil.
And I've wondered whether there are any important nutrients in insects.
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.