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RichardKennaway 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.