Good heavens Padraig! Your dentist is right (which is rare for dentists). Don't give up and sacrifice your teeth to fruitarianism without first at least trying a very low carb Paleo diet.
The thing is PaleoPhil, I'm interested in eating: 1. how I want to eat and feel like eating, 2. how I'm evolved to eat and 3. taking into account other people's advice and evidence so I can "patch" up things, eg. calcium.
Fair enough? Now:
1. I'm RIGHT NOW surviving best on fruit, it's true that I haven't gone for years on this diet before but others have. I have a feeling I'll be posting here in a year's time, you can see how it went. I don't want to eat any more protein. Okay that's a small fib to be perfectly honestly, I felt a little like eating 2 eggs today (scrambled, as I don't trust raw animal products) but as I've said, lately I've been cutting all animal protein down....
2. Considering that paleo man did not eat a very low carb diet very often IN MY OPINION and if he did it would have been for a few 100,000 years at MOST, I feel he is not evolved much for it and I'm not going to eat that way.
3. WHERE ARE YOUR VITAMINS?
WHERE ARE YOUR MINERALS?
WHERE ARE YOUR PHYTOCHEMICALS?
EVER HEARD OF FIBRE AND ITS IMPORTANCE???
There's not many around is there?! For the love of god try and eat more fruit.
Red meat is proven to give you cancer. Raw meat and fish can give you parasites and worms. Your bones will fall apart because of your acidy environment. Your kidneys will fail. It's the high-protein diet that cannot be kept up long term.
This is as opposed to what, alleged teeth problems?
Normally I don't try to convince vegetarians/vegans/fruitarians (unless they happen to raise some issues that I'd like to crystallize my own thoughts on, which you did initially before you went way off into la-la-land ;-) ), because they often have religious/philosophical/political reasons for choosing their diet, instead of scientific/health reasons and are therefore impervious to reason and logic, and because vegheads are my best allies--they sacrifice their health so that I can eat meats more cheaply.
Palophil, let's get a bit of perspective here. I'm not a 100% fruitarian or even vegan, I have fish and sometimes eggs. I have green tea and supplements and cocoa. 90% fruitarian is VASTLY less controversial and "fruity" as 90% meat and the latter is nothing like paleo man 95% of time plus in my opinion.
Any doctor or nearly any person would tell you that 90% meat is bad and VASTLY more extreme/hardcore than 90% fruitarian.
ESPECIALLY raw meat. It's insane... sorry, I don't often go there, but I had to this time.
However, you're an Irishman and possibly a relative, based on your last name, so I'll send you at least one more lifeline. Given that you eat some fish, I figure you might possibly listen to some reason.
Animals are your relatives as well and you eat them. I'm not using this as a part of my argument as to better/worse for health, I'm just throwing you a philosophical err... bone. Would you get a knife and murder a boar by slitting its neck and then eat it? I don't have that instinct... it's not in me. Maybe YOU are evolved for it, not me.
My teeth were maloccluded from birth and beginning in my late teens to early twenties were highly prone to placque and I developed gum disease. Going standard Paleo (I continued to eat Paleo-style carbs from fruits, nuts, all-natural juices and nut milks--Ray Audette and Loren Cordain actually had discouraged consumption of fruit juices and dried fruits, but I thought they were overly strict about that and I was under lots of pressure from relatives to continue eating significant amounts of carbs) helped, but I continued to have some gum problems despite brushing and flossing multiple times a day and getting professional cleanings every three months.
After I started the transition toward VLC-Paleo, I came across some posts in another forum by Lex Rooker and another poster named "DelFuego" while looking for tips on making pemmican that were quite encouraging and motivated me to accelerate my change. Lex had reported that his loose teeth firmed up on a raw meat/fat/organs diet and within just a few weeks of going semi-raw, VLC-Paleo I experienced the same thing--and I was not even as strict as Lex (I was still eating some berries and greens and small amounts of low-sugar, all-natural juices). The more I've moved toward Lex's diet, the better my dental health, skin health and overall well being have been, so I recommend you read Lex's story before you trash Paleo diets that are high in flesh foods. You can find it here: http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/lex-rooker-usa/
My skin was terrible and is now slowly getting to perfection on my fruitarian-esque diet. It was terrible despite all the green tea, huge amounts of fruit, vitamins etc. etc. I was taking, the only thing to slowly kill off the little bits of acne was the fruitarian-esque diet.
After just a month or so of transitioning to a very-low-carb (VLC), high meat/fat Paleo diet, including a significant amount of raw meats, I found I didn't need to brush and floss as much and no longer needed my prescription fluoride rinse. My hygienist was impressed with the improvement in my teeth and gums and asked if I'd been brushing and flossing more. I said no, I cut back on sweet drinks like fruit juices (I didn't tell her that I was also eating lots of meat and fat, including raw, had cut out nightshades and winter squashes completely, was actually brushing and flossing less, not more, and had stopped using my Px fluoride). She was puzzled and silent, but seemed to just barely accept that such remarkable results might be possible from that (she would have been more perplexed if I told her the whole truth :-) ).
Well good for you, everyone can do their own thing and see what works for them. Don't take this the wrong way but have you ever considered writing testimonials for flashy products sites....?
If you research Irish ancestry you'll learn that the Irish are descended from hunter-gatherers. Not fruitarians, hunter-gatherers. Embrace your heritage and your health will improve! Reject it, and you'll pay a price.
Think about it. Why were none of the people that Price studied fruitarian? If it's such a great diet, why did Price find so many peoples who were not fruitarian and healthy, whereas he found no fruitarian tribes?
My argument is that hunter-gatherers were more gatherers than they were hunters. Also there was a very long period when Irish people ate almost nothing but potatoes!!! If you couldn't survive well on potatoes (and to a lesser extent turnips and so on), then tough ****... you would be knocked out of existence by the famine if your ancestors lived through that especially. We're evolved to eat potatoes! But wait neither you or I eat any while the rest of Ireland eats them all the time...
Okay moving on from that unsettling (and probably not really too important) point....
You still haven't explained where you got the idea that Paleolithic humans were fruitarians. The book you mentioned, Man the Hunted, doesn't make that argument, nor did Darwin, and frugivorous apes are not humans, so where did you hear this? Surely you didn't base it on a quote or two from Darwin? Darwin must not have believed strongly in his flippant comments about a frugivorous diet, because during his travels to document his theory of evolution through natural selection, he ate an owl, armadillos, agoutis (the rodents were "best meat I ever tasted," he said), a puma, an ostrich-like bird called a Rhea, iguanas and giant tortoises. He liked giant tortoises so much "he loaded up 48 of them aboard the Beagle, to be eaten on the journey back!" (Source: http://www.neatorama.com/2008/12/04/10-fun-facts-about-charles-darwin/)
The book does make the argument a bit. Look at page 226 to page 231. They explained it better than I could, why type out things when they explain it better??? All of us here know (don't we?) that the appointed food "experts" often don't have an absolute clue about food (especially when it comes to being sensible). However I believe these guys are completely honest, there is nothing they could gain from it. I don't believe it could be made up much more than I believe evolution could be made up... big rant sorry: (as I was saying in a very lengthy and head-banging-off-desk argument with a poor soul on another forum, evolution COULD be all be made up, the fossil record could be made up, creationism COULD be true in certain definite ways and the big bang all rubbish... I'm the most anti-creationist person you could ever come across, but I still hold out the truth that it COULD be true, we're only told things about evolution and base our beliefs by what we're told.... okay sorry... rambling....)
Also, if so many people think that Stone Agers were fruitarians, as you seem to think, then why are there no Paleo-fruitarian diet forums?
Pure, unashamed, ad hominem. This is the same things you're saying over and over.
Plus, I know a vegetarian who ate lots of fruit and the enamel on her teeth deteriorated away, and a monk who lost all his teeth when his order required him to do frequent bread-and-water fasts, and another vegetarian who couldn't get pregnant until she started eating some meat, and I've read the accounts of numerous ex-vegetarians and ex-vegans who have done better on low-carb, flesh-heavy diets.
You know this person and that person and the Fruitarian Fairy came and stole their teeth and raped them while they slept and made them infertile is all hearsay and almost certainly all complete nonsense. Millions of vegetarians and vegans get pregnant every year.
One thing Rob reminded me of that I stupidly neglected to mention: I too have experienced tooth remineralization (which I didn't know was possible!), in my other dental improvements. There was a hole in my tooth that was exposed to the root and extremely painful. Since transitioning to a near-Lex diet the hole has partly filled in, is no longer painful at all--even when the hygienist scrapes it--and I no longer require fluoride rinse to treat it. I've NEVER heard of anyone claiming that a fruitarian diet led to tooth remineralization.
Back to the teeth AGAIN...? Fine, I do find it somewhat interesting to hear about your teeth remineralization.
In addition to Rob, wodgina6722 and me, at least one other raw paleo dieter has reported tooth remineralization (check out Michael Grogan's story at http://old.rawpaleodiet.com/michael-grogan/). So it seems to be more than just an isolated phenomenon.
I don't want sound obnoxious but after hearing about remineralization I thought maybe the high animal protein diet could do that. After reading this, I'm inclined to think that it probably IS a mainly isolated phenomenon
I think that Rob, Lex, Michael Grogan and I have all tried some sort of plant-based diet in the past, whether fruitarian or vegetarian, and it didn't work for any of us. So we've tried both a plant-based diet and a heavily flesh-based diet and found the latter to be superior. Have you even tried the latter? If not, how do you know it won't work for you? Remember the old saying, "Don't knock it till you've tried it." Why not give it a 4 week trial? If it doesn't work you, then you can have some ammunition to trash us with! :-)
That's great...except for that little issue with having to "wash" your teeth "all the time." I'm not criticizing you about that--just letting you know that an even better outcome might be possible.
I DID. I tried it and I hated it. I felt terrible. I said to myself never again. I've seen the problems of smoking so I won't do it, the same with high animal protein. I won't do that to my health. In my view paleo-man was 100000x more evolved for my diet of almost no animal protein. Maybe Neo-man ate much more like yours, I'll agree with you there.
You should call your diet the "neo diet"... the diet of Neolithic people.
I certainly wouldn't argue with it. Start up your own website about it, rawneoforum.com Don't forget to also consume other humans from time to time as neo man also probably did considering his life expectancy was about 20.
