However I'm not aware of any studies that attempt to distinguish between the various flavors of low-carb diets like paleo vs. Atkins.
The main difference is that the organizing principle of LCHF/Atkins is just that - replacing carbohydrate with fat, sometimes even to the point of ketosis. Studies that compare fat/carb ratio in diets to health factors are applicable to the whole carb vs. fat debate.
The organizing principle of the Paleo memeplex is that there are a few key things about modern lifestyles that negatively impact health - some popular targets include shoe-wearing, chairs, sit-down toilets, sedentary lifestyles, and most famously high grain consumption.
It's true that the paleo diet ends up being relatively low carb, since grains are the major carbohydrate source...but the central claim doesn't actually make any testable predictions about carb/fat ratios. Rather, the major testable prediction of the Paleo diet is that the human body is ill equipped to digest ]large amounts of grain.
So the relevant studies would be those that look at the effects of grains and components such as phytates, gluten, lectin...etc, on leaky gut syndrome, digestive gut flora, inflammation, nutrient absorption, and such - there wouldn't be much overlap between these studies and carb/fat ratio studies.
There's enough to justify elevating some form of low-carb to the null hypothesis.
Maybe? It's difficult to make broad prescriptive claims in nutrition, and I'm not sure "low fat" and "low carb" are precise enough categories. My guess would be that both low fat and low carb win out over the standard diet simply because cutting out either one is likely to cause some calorie reduction and a compensatory increase in vegetable consumption.
The argument from the Paleo-memeplex would be the "null hypothesis" for diet should be based off of what we ate prior to agriculture. In the absence of evidence, evolutionarily novel foods are guilty until proven innocent, while ancestral foods are innocent until proven guilty. (Of course, the question of what exactly constitutes an evolutionarily novel food is not simple)
Fruit and honey I find much more questionable, especially honey. But I suppose if you limit yourself to honey you've personally harvested from wild beehives without the benefits of modern technology like bee suits, you'll probably be fine. :-)
Hehe - well, as a sweetener it's certainly an improvement on straight sugar and as a calorie source it's an improvement over starch.
Not sure what the objection to fruit would be, though. Fruit juice, maybe, since it's easy to over-eat when your food is in liquid form.
Advocates of the Paleo diet would claim that that the ideal diet has near zero grain content. Sugar, on the other hand, is not intrinsically harmful...it's just that we frequently overdose. The ideal diet does contain some sugars.
I think that the null hypothesis has to be based on the actual studies that have been done, not on poorly founded hypotheses about what our ancestors did and did not eat in the ancestral environment.
Fruits are probably only an issue for those of us trying to lose weight. However most of the fruits we eat have been bred over hundreds of years or more to be larger and sweeter (i.e. contain more fructose) than natural fruits. And some fruits are higher in starches than others, so if you're trying to lose weight and failing, it's worth cutting these out. Not ...
So this year I've stopped working out, and my grades have improved drastically, but at the cost of losing muscle mass and gaining fat, and becoming physically slower and lazier just as I became faster and more active intellectually. One effect I especially noticed was the disappearance of that perpetual state of happiness/satisfaction that comes from frequent physical exertion, which I think had a tendency to get in the way of a feeling of urgency regarding studies; why bother with tiresome and frustrating intellectual exercise when physical exercise yielded results and pleasure/satisfaction much more easily and reliably?
Anyway, this got me thinking: "I need to figure out a training that is optimized for intellectual performance. Aspects that might be interesting to work on would be:
These ideas I'm throwing around from a position of extreme ignorance. I've tried hiring nutritionists, but their diets were optimized for bodybuilding, not for intellectual efficacy, and were incredibly troublesome to follow. These involved about five to eight meals a day, large amounts of meat or meat substitutes, which is expensive to sustain, and me in a perpetual state of either hunger or digestive lethargy, plus permanent muscular soreness from the training regime that goes with it... and then there's the supplements.
So, yeah, I'm no gwern, but I'd love to figure out a diet that allows me to work at maximum efficacy. Other concerns, such as feeling strong or looking attractive or even dancing well, are quite far behind in priority. How should I go about this? How about you lads and ladies? What's your experience with dieting/working-out? More importantly, what does the research say?
P.S. I tried to read "Good Calories Bad Calories", but I never managed to finish it: it spent so much time attacking the current paradygm that I grew tired of waiting for it to actually list and summarize its recommendations. If anyone here finished reading that and drew out the conclusions, I'd love to hear them.
P.P.S. The main post will update as the discussion advances; once enough proper information is gathered, a top level post might emerge.