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Kevin comments on Announcing the Quantified Health Prize - Less Wrong
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To Less Wrong: what are your priors on nutrition? Not necessarily what you do, but what your prior life experience and research has led you to believe is actually correct.
I'll start:
Paleo diet is great, except some carbs and gluten are fine in moderation except in a minority (though possible a high minority, like 40%) of people with outlying genetic mutations that make them process carbs improperly (I admit my prior on this is partially determined by my current unwillingness to stop eating pizza and sandwiches). Intermittent fasting helps prevent cancer.
If you eat paleoish with 5-6 servings of diverse fruits and vegetables daily, you might only be deficient in vitamin D, fish oil, Vitamin E, zinc, magnesium, calcium, (and iron for women) potassium, sodium, lithium.
Also, trace minerals are good (such as in ConcenTrace supplement), but there is probably not good evidence on this.
It might be possible to get an almost totally healthy no supplement diet if you were willing to eat lots of organ meat and use a Vitamin D Lamp.
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." -- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, a book which I have not actually read, but which pretty much describes my attitude to all of the diet fads around (including geek fads like paleo), and my actual eating habits.
And paleo is "great"?
Pollan's book is horrible. It is actually against science per se in nutrition, continuously bringing up the supposed holistic irreducibility of diets and emphasizing "common sense", "tradition" and "what our grandparents ate" as primary guidelines. Pollan presents several cherry-picked past mistakes of nutrition science, and from that concludes that nutrition science in general is evil.
I am not fundamentally against heuristics derived from tradition and/or evolution, but Pollan seems to use such heuristics whimsically, mostly to push forward a personal agenda of vegetarianism, organic foods and an extremely warm and fuzzy philosophical baggage of food culture and lifestyle. Also, Pollan's arguments are almost exclusively based on affect (nature = good, artificial = evil, people selling artificial food = monstrous, etc.). Actually, looking a bit into the book to refresh my memories, Pollan doesn't even use traditions to make inferences about foods' healthiness; they are merely convenient sources of positive affect.
Paleo is a big tent with many suboptimal stalls.
Plant nutrition is more difficult to optimize than animal sources. Plants are not strictly necessary, and become completely optional once comfortable starch intake is achieved.
Yes, paleo is great. No, it is not a fad, although it contains various fads.
Fad: "a temporary fashion, notion, manner of conduct, etc., especially one followed enthusiastically by a group."
Paleo is no more a fad than are herbal remedies. Neither are temporary phenomena.
Actually, you can get all vitamins, minerals and micronutrients by eating scallops only. It's a whole animal and mineral rich due to inexhaustibility of ocean water (compared to soil mineral content).
But you still need rice and fish protein for nutritional bulk and flavor.
Any citations or links?
I went a month eating nothing but boiled rice, scallops and water. It was the highest energy/mood/libido diet I've ever tried, but I couldn't maintain weight because it tasted gross.
My prior probability that any diet consisting solely of rice, water and any one X is a bad idea is very high. I'd want to see very strong evidence that scallops really do contain everything a human needs to remain healthy.
Many of the other extreme elimination diets I tried showed obvious signs of micronutrient deficiency. For example, I tried bread and water, lean meat and water, etc. It's easy to recognize signs of deficiency - fatigue, cravings, etc.
But I wouldn't say scallops have everything. I did lose weight. I think you'd have to add in some fish to get a complete diet. Not so much for vitamins or minerals, but for something related to satiety and macronutrient composition. It could be insufficient fats/oils, or maybe you can't get enough protein because it triggers satiety too fast due to impending overdose of some micronutrient. Or maybe it's just the taste.
I've been going for many months on a diet of solely rice, fish, scallops, rice and shrimp. Since I'm still healthy and productive, there can't be any short or medium-term deficiency there.
In general, however, a meat-only elimination diet works. See the Stefansson trial, and his study from living with Eskimos. Meat with sufficient fat on it is all that is needed to sustain human life, and it can even come from a single animal, as long as that animal isn't being grain fed from mineral depleted soil.
Thus it's not so much surprising that rice, water, and any X meat is sufficient for health. Rather, the extreme positive biological reaction to micronutrient overload from high scallops intake is what's surprising.
Why do you think it is that supplements are so much more toxic than food? Eat a dozen oysters, you'll get 1200% of the RDA of zinc and feel great. Eat 12 zinc pills, and you'll probably vomit within 5 minutes.
What about food buffers the effects of minerals? I've come to understand that the ratios of minerals is of supreme importance and of course food has much more complex ratios of minerals, but I'm sure there is something else going on here.
I'd like to test that theory. I'll be back in five minutes.
facepalm
If I was betting on it, I would have said within 20 minutes and on an empty stomach. You should get nauseous, at least, but the contents of your stomach might be enough to hold it down.
I haven't eaten anything in 4 hours. I had 12 pills in one swallow each of which apparently has two and a half times the RDI of zinc for males. I haven't experienced any nausea. If I head eaten a dozen oysters on the other hand I am almost certain I'd have vomited. But that says a lot more about my aversion to oysters than their zinc content.
More generally I can confirm that taking vitamins on an empty stomach most certainly does produce more acute side effects. For example I tried a pharmacological dose of niacin (1g) on an empty stomach and apart from the intense pain and flushing over my entire body I was extremely nauseous and nearly passed out. The same dose with a meal only gives me a mild, almost pleasant tingling sensation - albeit one that lasted longer.
Now... no more zinc for me for a couple of weeks.
That's an impressive feat! Unfortunately it tells us only a little about whether scallops give you all the vitamins and minerals you need. From what I understand you will not experience much in the way of scurvy after just one month of being deprived of vitamin C, let alone get a clear picture of the long term results of any lack in the more subtle deficiencies!
I'd love to see some links too. I'd perhaps take for granted that scallops could give the basic minerals we require (seawater has most of the same salts that we need) but the vitamins I'd have expected to be a different story!
I was driven to it by necessity, I have intraheptic cholestasis.
You aren't very familiar with the paleo literature. Conclusive evidence exists that human beings can consume just about any animal monotonically without suffering nutrient deficiency. Exceptions might be extremely simple animals like snails or maybe starfish that don't share enough similarity. But most seafood and land animals will work.
The major exception to this rule is that some animals don't have enough fat to sustain life, which leads to protein poisoning. The solution is to either eat more carbs or more fat from another source.
Vitamin C deficiency is impossible to contract while eating fresh meat. See polar expeditions for details. This is a problem with the "daily value" theory. Vitamin C is present in meat in far smaller amounts than in plants, but because of greater bioavailability, it is actually a better source than plant sources. As long as the meat is fresh.
I may put together all this at some point, with links etc. It's buried in my notes.
That sounds extremely expensive. (And I know where to get cheap frozen scallops.) What's the next best cheap diet?
Yes, although hunger decreased dramatically, so I didn't eat nearly as much scallops as you would think. Scallops have a major impact on food satiety and cravings, I've found. I suspect we tend to overconsume food to compensate for low density of key micronutrients.
My long term stable diet is 1. scallops daily, one package; 2. unlimited white rice; 3. lean fish - cod, perch or pollock; 4. shrimp for flavor/texture.
Diluting the scallop content brings down cost. The enhancement effect isn't quite as extreme, but it's still very good.
This diet has almost no fat or any other difficult to digest substances due to my intraheptic cholestasis. If you are digestively normal, you could fill out the rest of the diet with any paleo ingredients, as long as you eat scallops daily.
I believe this delivers superior performance to the typical paleo grass-fed organ meat route, but I cannot personally test this due to my limitations. I think humans are well adapted to a shoreline diet due to bottleneck event(s) caused by some natural catastrophe that rendered extinct those humans without access to shorelines. If you've watched Survivor, you know that any bipedal idiot can gather shellfish on the beach. Ancient shellfish middens indicate that they were a major food source.
I think you're overreaching the idea of adaptation there. Scallops and other bivalve molluscs contain a lot of dietary protein, and also a lot of nutrients we need; part of the reason we need many of those specific nutrients is that unlike even many of our closest relatives, we can't synthesize them internally. So it shouldn't be surprising that a food rich in those things, with very few "empty" calories and which is not too calorically dense would be beneficial...
Sometimes it's better to ask than to assume someone has already exhausted his case.
http://eatingoffthefoodgrid.blogspot.com/2009/10/pleistocene-diet.html http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes.html
Was seasoning forbidden?
Yes, unfortunately
I love scallops, but I've never known someone to eat the whole animal. Unless you collect them yourself, I don't think you even could; I've only ever seen the adductor muscles for sale.
Yes, you're right, I was wrong about that
Are there other foods with this property? I hate scallops. (And shrimp.)
In theory, any shellfish should do it. Shrimp don't have this property. Shrimp are scavengers, whereas shellfish filter water. The latter activity is what creates the high mineral content.
Clams?
Yep, should work
Any bivalve, really -- clams, oysters, mussels.