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MrMind comments on Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014 - Less Wrong
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I'm afraid that it largely depends on your initial diet. For me, paleo was a net disaster (3 months with quality of life substantially reduced, and 3 kgs gained), but probably because I came from an already healthier diet.
If you factor in that in a high proteic diet you have higher than normal insuline spikes and you may lose the ability to process gluten, then you might actually gain some benefit.
In my admittedly small social circle, I've seen though more people benifit from a vegetarian diet than from paleo.
Agreed. Paleo is vastly superior to SAD (standard American diet), but it's an open scientific question whether paleo is better than other common diets. (I'm paleo.)
If you do low carbohydrate paleo there can be a difficult transition period (see Atkins Flu).
Is this because there's no reason to think that it should be better or because there are contrasting data?
Because of the limits of nutritional science where they can't run long randomized experiments on people. The theoretical case for paleo is excellent.
Could you provide some solid evidence? I've never found something that didn't crumble at the first investigation.
I can't back up any of this with solid citations but: If our ancestors have been eating a food for a very long time that's Bayesian evidence that the food is safe. We have been eating meat for so long that it seems likely parts of us are dependent on stuff we can get only from meat. Cancer, heart disease, and strokes seem to be mostly diseases of civilization that were relatively rare among hunter-gatherers who ate their traditional diets. Things go really badly for hunter-gatherers who switch from their traditional diets to modern diets. Wheat is cheap to grow so even if it is unhealthy it's understandable that it would be widely consumed. It's also understandable that sugar, being a superstimulus would be widely consumed even if it is unhealthy. Lots of people who try paleo succeed in loosing weight. The modern obesity epidemic shows something is very wrong with SAD (Standard American Diet) and paleo offers a tried and true safe harbor.
Cancer and heart disease are diseases of longevity. Why expect paleo to help with them when there's every reason to believe longevity wasn't a part of that environment?
I don't have data at hand, but I think that's true only partially. Yes, the prevalence of cancer and CVD is a function of the age of the population, but as far as I remember, even after you control for age, they still show up as diseases of civilization with the "primitive" societies having considerably lesser age-adjusted rates.
At least one causal pathway for that is visible: diabetes and the metabolic syndrome in general are clearly diseases of civilization and they are strong risk factors for CVD (I don't know about cancer).
Interesting - I've modeled all cancer in my mind as vaguely similar to testicular cancer - one is likely to get it, but unlikely to die of it unless you survive many other potential causes of death.
In other words, I'm not sure if the data we care about is prevalence-of-cancer or prevalence-of-cancer-deaths.
On reflection, I think the assertion under question is essentially "Paleo diet creates more QUALYs." Which should be answered in part by how much prevalence of cancer effects quality of life even if the cancer was not a causal factor in death.
Cancer is really cancers -- it's a class of diseases which are pretty diverse. Some are slow and rarely actually kill people (e.g. prostate cancer), some are fast and highly lethal.
I think we care about prevalence of cancer (morbidity) because the prevalence of cancer deaths (mortality) heavily depends on the progress in medicine and availability of medical services.
My impression is that the answer is "a lot".
While I don't have the stats, I think that 50,000 years ago if you lived to 30, you had a reasonable chance of living to 70, and cancer and heart disease kill lots of people under 70.
"Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination", Gurven & Kaplan 2007; might be helpful.
Good article. Quotes:
It might be true if the so-called paleo diets resembled actual old diets. But they don't. Even in paleolithic times human diets varied by region. And many of the crops included in paleo diets didn't exist in the cultivars and forms they exist in now. See for example this talk.
It's not a binary thing. Eating a diet consisting mostly of grass-fed meat, seafood, and vegetables is a lot closer to what our ancestors ate than the standard American diet is.
As James_Miller said, it's not a binary thing. Paleo-style diets are closer -- not identical -- to actual paleolithic diets (compared, say, to SAD).
The point of paleo isn't really to pretend to be a caveman though reading some promotional materials will give you that idea. The point is to get rid of food which the humans have encountered only recently in evolutionary terms.
Paleo certainly doesn't go all the way (for one thing you'd have to exclude pretty much all cultivated fruits to start with), but makes a step, and it's debatable how big of a step, in that direction.
When I did my paleo experiment, I wasn't really eating any more protein than before. My carbs were way down though, and my fat intake way up. I wonder if this may explain some of the difference in our outcomes.
Huh? Gluten sensitivity is an autoimmune problem, you don't acquire it by not eating wheat.
People who have done paleo can sometimes have issues processes carbs because you lose the stomach bacteria necessary to do so. It was poorly phrased. The transition back can be hard.
Even then, it's not like you "lose the ability" -- the gut microbiota changes fairly rapidly so you should be fine in a few days. But I agree that transitions between very different restrictive diets can be hard on the body.
This runs contrary to what I've ready, but not specifically on gluten-related microbiota. Apparently change in the overall ecology of gut microbes can be very difficult to recover from.
Here is some data on the ease of changing one's microbiota. However you have a valid point in that the persistence of particular kinds of microbiota is not well understood and evidently it's possible to fall into, um, local minima that are hard to get out of (thus the whole fecal transplant business).
I suspect the reality here is much more complicated than the simple "easy to change"/"hard to change" approach.
It's more complicated than that. Small intestine microbiota might have a role in the genesis of the celiac disease.
Link? There are theories that infection by certain viruses can trigger celiac in genetically susceptible people, but infection doesn't usually count as microbiota.
I've found this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25483329
Well, it's behind the paywall, but even the abstract is pretty clear that there are no results (aka no evidence). The paper seems to want to "discuss future research directions".
What I read is: it's possible that microbiota alteration have a role in CD, but studies that focus on that link are missing, so we should investigate more. Your sentence seems to imply that you read in the article the exact opposites, that studies were made but didn't find any link. I know that's not what you stated, I just want to be clear on the presuppositions.
As you said: there is no evidence, but there might be if it was investigated. So a role of microbiota is possible and at least not fantastically improbable. That's why I used "might" five comments above.
I said "no results (aka no evidence)" which implies no data pointing one way or another. If I had said "negative results" that would have implied that there is evidence disproving the hypothesis.
LOL. There is a HUGE space of hypotheses for which there is no evidence but which are "not fantastically improbable". Oh, and there's a fellow with a razor here, he wants to talk to you... :-)
It's a review paper. Of course it doesn't present its own experimental results. It says it presents data (from other papers, no doubt) correlating CD with small intestine microbia, though this data is not sufficient to show causation.
I like Paleo with a mix of fast and slow moving carbs. I eat a primarily protein diet and then mix in small amounts of different kinds of carbs and a little non-cow dairy.