The Avg Lifespan / Life Expectancy Canard

[TylerDurden]

I can testify that you are wrong in this respect. As William points out consensus in science does not mean truth. A false idea doesn't become true just because a majority of scientists adopts it or because a large number of "studies" apparently supports it. There is no principle of democracy that works in science. And there are many reasons that explain this unfortunate situation. One of them is the peer reviewed publication system as well as conference organization principles that strongly favors consensus and rejects minority opinions and outsiders. Another is simply that among scientists too there are much more followers than creative leaders. So if the leaders overlooked something or there is a fundamental flaw in the "studies" one gets both consensus and bad science. 

Moreover there is actually a huge amount of (junk) works in "food science" on all the "positive" effects of cooking. To find them you have to look under Maillard reaction products which is just the original name for AGEs, the one used by food scientists long before a few medical scientists "discovered" the same chemicals from their dark side in diabetes studies and renamed them in their way.

In particular "food scientists" assigned antioxidant properties to Maiillard products alias AGEs and there was  a large consensus about their "positive" effects over several tens of years. And yet, just bad science.   

 

Virtually all the studies , these days,favouring cooking, focus on unhealthy non-palaeo foods like grains. Given that there are also multiple other studies which focus on the ill-health caused by grains-consumption, the pro-cooking camp is discredited.

Also, the wonderful aspect of science is , like you said, that they favour the majority , so with the raw(or anti-cooking) camp having far more studies in its favour, it is now becoming more and more difficult to defend the practice of cooking.It doesn't matter if scientists make mistakes along the way as, as we've seen, they always in the end, correct them. And I heavily disagree re your notion as current scientific concensus is only solid if backed by a mass of studies. That's why Wrangham very reluctantly was forced to acknowledge the existence of AGEs, despite his obvious distaste re that issue.

[TylerDurden]

Yes, and no doubt critics will ironically some day try to tag Tyler with promoting "noble savagery," if they haven't already, for promoting raw Paleo as superior to the cooked modern foods of civilization. So for him to use that charge against us is "a bit like the pot calling the kettle black."

The above claim is nonsense, of course since I'm not one of those RVAFers who goes on about the excellent health of the Inuit or whatever tribe.

. My whole point was that too many RVAFers were relying too much on dodgy claims from past eras/tribes with little or no real evidence to support such. We simply will not be taken seriously by scientists if we keep on mentioning frauds like Price with all their blather about the noble-savage -like lifestyle.

[TylerDurden]

As has been pointed out, this is absolutely not how scientific knowledge is produced. That's how bullshit hysterical nonsense gets pushed on the public via the media and institutions looking to score more grant money. Scientific knowledge is the product of constantly testing hypotheses. There is never certainty and everything can be falsified.

You're applying a far too strict interpretation of scientific results. There have been many theorems/theories (such as Fermat' Theorem) which stayed, technically,  unproven for centuries but were still regarded as canon in the meantime because of the available evidence at the time. In short, we don't have to make the pro-raw claims as strong as, say, the theory of gravity, before it becomes accepted by a sufficient number of people.The point is that the mass of scientific studies favouring our position (re anti-cooking) is now so large that it is becoming more difficult for people to justify cooking on a scientific basis(after all, scientists have to refer to scientific results/studies to back up their own views, ultimately). Granted, on a cultural level, as opposed to scientific, we have a long way to go re full acceptance of raw, but we've made  incredible progress, particularly in the last 20 years, on the scientific front.

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that cooked food is harmful. I believe it's a strong hypothesis, and merits further testing. It is not yet a well tested, proven hypothesis that generates a theory which can predict results. No one as done studies where one cohort eats raw and another eats the same stuff cooked and compared health outcomes. The fact that studies in humans are hard does not change the reality of the scientific method - until the raw hypothesis is tested, to claim that it's fully backed by science is, by definition, wrong. It's compelling. It is not proven.

One doesn't need a study which compares raw-eating to cooked-eating people. All one needs is what we have so far:- studies showing distinct localised harm done to human tissue by AGEs, studies showing a reduction in negative symptoms after following a low-AGE diet, studies showing a direct link between age-related conditions and levels of AGEs etc.

No one needs to show that AGEs are beneficial. The burden of proof is on the raw claimaint to show that cooking causes statistically significant levels of harm in a population.

Absolutely wrong. The burden of proof is on the pro-cooking camp to show that cooked food is either harmless or more beneficial than raw food. After all, we are the only species on this entire planet that cooks its own food.

[alphagruis]

Interesting, I speculated only semi-seriously that some might have claimed that AGEs were medicinal in the way that some claim the natural insecticides in plants might be medicinal/healthy antioxidants/etc. and now I find that someone scientists actually did claim that AGEs were themselves antioxidants. Negative reactions like diarrhea to plant antinutrients are sometimes written off as temporary "detox" reactions (such as by raw vegans and vegetarians in past forum discussions I've seen and at this source: "Sample List of Allowed Foods on a Detox Diet," http://altmedicine.about.com/od/detoxcleansing/a/Foods_Eat.htm) that are actually part of a healthy process. I wonder if anyone made the same claims regarding negative reactions to cooked foods?

I am not aware whether or not someone went that far.

It is quite funny to see that actually various medicinal (antimutagen, antioxidant, antibiotic, and antiallergen) properties of AGE's have often been pointed out and looked for in even fairly recent works where the negative effects of these chemicals is the main concern. It seems to me that scientists desperately look for some positive effects of cooking.  The following abstract from 1996 is just one example: (Food browning=formation of AGEs)

Food Browning and Its Prevention: An Overview†

Mendel Friedman Western Regional Research Center, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 800 Buchanan Street, Albany, California 94710

 Enzymatic and nonenzymatic browning reactions of amino acids and proteins with carbohydrates, oxidized lipids, and oxidized phenols cause deterioration of food during storage and processing. The loss in nutritional quality and potentially in safety is attributed to destruction of essential amino acids, decrease in digestibility, inhibition of proteolytic and glycolytic enzymes, interaction with metal ions, and formation of antinutritional and toxic compounds. Studies in this area include influence of damage to essential amino acids on nutrition and food safety, nutritional damage as a function of processing conditions, and simultaneous formation of deleterious and beneficial compounds. These compounds include kidney-damaging Maillard reaction products, mutagens, carcinogens, antimutagens, antioxidants, antibiotics, and antiallergens. This overview covers the formation, nutrition, and safety of glycated proteins, characterized browning products, and heterocyclic amines. Possible approaches to inhibiting browning reactions and preventing adverse effects of browning during food processing and food consumption, including protection against adverse effects of heterocyclic amines by N-acetylcysteine, caffeine, chlorophyll, conjugated linoleic acid, lignin, and tea extracts, are also described. This research subject covers a complex relationship of the chemistry, biology, and pathology of browning products and the impact on human nutrition and health. Future study should differentiate antinutritional and toxicological relationships, define individual and combined potencies of browning products, and develop means to prevent the formation and to minimize the adverse manifestations of the most antinutritional and toxic compounds. Such studies should lead to better and safer foods and improved human health.

 

[alphagruis]

Cooking might just be yet another one of those toxic yet not epidemiologically significant activities modern humans participate in. The science has not been done to show it one way or the other.

I think that the adverse effects of cooking are now by far a sufficiently compelling conjecture. Everything points actually to them not only the formation of AGEs, but also the racemization and deamidation of the aminoacids, the formation of crosslinked aminoacids such as lysinoalanin, the formation of glucose or other sugar degradation products, the oxidation of lipids etc etc.

Were it not for the formidable cultural barrier, the raw hypothesis would have been tested and adopted tens of years ago by the scientists. In every other scientific domain, such an attractive conjecture would have resulted in an explosion of works intended to test the idea.   

I bet that even if a scientist finally provided some day in the future a study that compares a 100% raw and a cooked diet with the likely outcome that raw is the winner, his work would be sharply criticized and every tortuous argument used to reject it.

Moreover I find it very funny to think about the feelings of the attendants of an international conference, where the above scientist had given a talk presenting his work, during the subsequent traditionnal conference dinner offering them a "nice cooked meal". 

[alphagruis]

The Maori at that time had mean lifespans of c.25 , less than their French/English counterparts.As for the issue of lifespan and health, it is noteworthy that people are not only living longer but are healthier than in the past(I don't necessarily attribute that to diet but to modern life providing extra comforts unavailable in previous generations).

This doesn't make sense. We don't really know what the maximum lifespan was for all these peoples before contact. Mean lifespan is a tricky notion that depends on so much different things that it is of little interest.

Similarly "to be healthier" is just a vague concept. I don't think that 30% dental decay is healthier than a few percent or less. Of course modern availability of abundant cheap energy has helped tremendously in providing extra comforts, no starvation, medical crutches in the form of drugs and hospitals etc but we should now be aware that this is just temporary and at any rate irrelevant to the present discussion. Again it is quite misleading to compare paleomen with the situation prevailing during the past century.  

[pfw]

Absolutely wrong. The burden of proof is on the pro-cooking camp to show that cooked food is either harmless or more beneficial than raw food. After all, we are the only species on this entire planet that cooks its own food.

I'm beginning to think you want to be regarded as fringe. This line of argument virtually guarantees no progress, or at the very least is the best possible way to retard progress.

Since virtually every human being on the planet eats cooked food for the majority of their diet, and the average industrialized human still manages to live longer than at any point in recorded history, claiming that they have to prove their diet's efficacy over one that hasn't obtained since pre-civilizational times is laughably absurd to anyone not already a firm believer in raw. In pop-science, the burden of proof is on the paradigm changer, which is, in this case, raw. In real science, the burden of proof is on the claimaint period, regardless of what they are claiming. If you make a positive assertion that raw is better, you must prove it.

One doesn't need a study which compares raw-eating to cooked-eating people. All one needs is what we have so far:- studies showing distinct localised harm done to human tissue by AGEs, studies showing a reduction in negative symptoms after following a low-AGE diet, studies showing a direct link between age-related conditions and levels of AGEs etc.

A comparison is precisely what is needed to demonstrate the validity of the hypothesis. Without it, it will forever be conjecture. This is, again, essentially required by the scientific method. It's not "a strict interpretation" because there is no other possible interpretation. You don't have a data point until you run a test to gather it. All extrapolations must be tested. All sorts of evil has been done because people find lots of supporting evidence for an idea which later, upon direct testing, turns out to be completely wrong - certainty without rigorous, direct testing is unwarranted.

alphagruis: I agree that a raw v cooked study will be difficult to do given the cultural biases towards cooked food. A real test might not take place in my lifetime, if it ever does. However, that does not change the status of the hypothesis. The reality of the situation is that until a comparison study is done to confirm the hypothesis, it remains a hypothesis. Which is really all I'm trying to point out here.

[PaleoPhil]

... I'm not one of those RVAFers who goes on about the excellent health of the Inuit or whatever tribe.

. My whole point was that too many RVAFers were relying too much on dodgy claims from past eras/tribes with little or no real evidence to support such.

This seems a matter of necessity. There haven't been many controlled, randomized clinical trials on Paleo diets (only two, as I recall, and they included significant cooked foods) and none that I know of on raw Paleo diets, so I believe that leaves us with the following for evidence:

1) paleoanthropological analysis of Paleolithic hominid skeletal/dental remains and the remains of their tools, clothes, shelters, discarded food remains, etc.
2) observational studies of modern traditional tribes, such as the Kitavan acne study (which you could cite if you wish, since I believe it's a fairly high carb diet)
3) nutritional studies of other diets that contain some other elements of RPD or that find problems with modern aspects of diets (such as grains, dairy, legumes, sugars, cooking, etc.)
4) inductions and deductions from knowledge of human and animal biology, anatomy, physiology, morphology, medicine, biochemistry, etc.
5) our own experiences--not scientific, but compassionate physicians and fellow dieters tend to take it seriously
6) the anecdotal experiences of others (for example, your experience serves as anecdotal evidence for me)--this is probably the weakest evidence of all of these and is not scientific, but it can provide useful clues. For example: I had loose teeth and a medical history somewhat similar to Lex's, Lex reported firming teeth and other benefits on his diet which, along with the anecdotal success stories of Del Fuego and William intrigued me enough to get me started on my planned near-ZC experiment, and I emulated Lex's diet to a great extent and experienced several of the same benefits. These experiences were not scientific evidence, but they did help me out a lot by helping to motivate and guide me.

So "[going] on about the excellent health of the Inuit or whatever tribe," as you put it, seems to be relatively unavoidable if we are going to discuss much in the way of evidence for Paleolithic (hunter-gatherer) nutrition. While double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical studies are considered the gold standard in nutritional science, these categories of evidence were apparently sufficient to get everyone here to try the diet. You see to draw mainly from category 3. What evidence convinced you to try it? If I missed any categories, please let me know.

I've actually found the knowledge that scientists have gleaned from studying Paleolithic remains and modern HG tribes to be generally more useful in my own experience than clinical studies, so it's no surprise that I would cite it. I use it because IT WORKS FOR ME and has worked for dozens of other people that I know about, not out of some fictitious desire to re-enact Paleolithic times for the sake of re-enactment. That may be entertaining, along the lines of Civil War re-enactment I suppose, but if it doesn't do anything for my health or well being or the environment or provide some other rational and observable benefit, then I'm not interested. For example, I'm not a believer in magic or superstition or whatever you want to call it.

On the other hand, if some of the older ways, such as those that the RPD/Paleo/PaNu/etc. diets are based upon, work for me, then I'm not going to discard them simply because they're not modern or "civilized" or because someone ridicules it as "tribal" or "a noble savage theory" or re-enactment or animal-murder or orthorexia or anorexia or whatever other accusation someone comes up with next--that's their problem, not mine. You've adopted one of the older approaches (all-raw) whole-heartedly. I don't accuse you of promoting noble savagery because of that--but I would not be surprised if you are on the receiving end of some of this sort of criticism in the future. I accept your word that all-raw works for you. Please show me the same courtesy and stop bringing up these canards unless I actually directly and specifically use them to support my case (and I think you could argue that with William re: Paleo Utopianism at this point, but good luck on trying to convince him otherwise ). Please don't try to read my mind or discern hidden motives or read between the lines. It's not necessary--I'm a very simple man. Let's just deal with what we actually write. I know it's not easy on the Internet given all the trolls and whatnot, but I think I've demonstrated by now that I'm not a troll and I've tried to do the RPD as close as I can given my circumstances.

We simply will not be taken seriously by scientists if we keep on mentioning frauds like Price with all their blather about the noble-savage -like lifestyle.

I sympathize with your concern about that and I know that most vegetarians and vegans and some scientists and doctors who have heard of Price simply dismiss whatever someone who disagrees with them is saying if they cite Price, and I've tried to go easy on citing him since you tipped me off to the growing support there is here for him, but I think that the raw-meat aspect of our diet frankly turns off such people even more, so it may not make a huge difference in the long run. However, this is an anti-dairy forum, so I can understand your low tolerance for Price, especially the WAPF, which seems even more pro-raw-dairy than Price's evidence actually was.

Given all that, I see no problem with people citing other non-Price evidence re: tribal peoples, such as provided by Cordain, Eaton, Lindeberg, Wortman, etc. Do you have a problem with that? Are you afraid it will give legitimacy to Price's work?

P.S., As I've mentioned before, I would prefer it if we forego the "nonsense" comments--and you can take me to task on that if I do it. It doesn't improve your arguments and that sort of language only tends to make people dig in more. An occasional outburst doesn't bother me, especially if there is humor inserted somewhere, but a negative pattern starts to get a mite unpleasant after a while. I see us as being in two different sections of the same big tent here and therefore on the same team.

[PaleoPhil]

...These compounds include kidney-damaging Maillard reaction products, mutagens, carcinogens, antimutagens, antioxidants, antibiotics, and antiallergens. ...

Thanks, but this one appears to regard Maillard products as unhealthy, rather than healthy.

[TylerDurden]

This doesn't make sense. We don't really know what the maximum lifespan was for all these peoples before contact. Mean lifespan is a tricky notion that depends on so much different things that it is of little interest.

[/quote]

Actually we do. It is possible to estimate the rough age of bones on a scientific basis, and my figure re Maoris is quite correct.

[TylerDurden]

This seems a matter of necessity. There haven't been many controlled, randomized clinical trials on Paleo diets (only two, as I recall, and they included significant cooked foods) and none that I know of on raw Paleo diets, so I believe that leaves us with the following for evidence:

1) paleoanthropological analysis of Paleolithic hominid skeletal/dental remains and the remains of their tools, clothes, shelters, discarded food remains, etc.
2) observational studies of modern traditional tribes, such as the Kitavan acne study (which you could cite if you wish, since I believe it's a fairly high carb diet)
3) nutritional studies of other diets that contain some other elements of RPD or that find problems with modern aspects of diets (such as grains, dairy, legumes, sugars, cooking, etc.)
4) inductions and deductions from knowledge of human and animal biology, anatomy, physiology, morphology, medicine, biochemistry, etc.
5) our own experiences--not scientific, but compassionate physicians and fellow dieters tend to take it seriously
6) the anecdotal experiences of others (for example, your experience serves as anecdotal evidence for me)--this is probably the weakest evidence of all of these and is not scientific, but it can provide useful clues. For example: I had loose teeth and a medical history somewhat similar to Lex's, Lex reported firming teeth and other benefits on his diet which, along with the anecdotal success stories of Del Fuego and William intrigued me enough to get me started on my planned near-ZC experiment, and I emulated Lex's diet to a great extent and experienced several of the same benefits. These experiences were not scientific evidence, but they did help me out a lot by helping to motivate and guide me.

So "[going] on about the excellent health of the Inuit or whatever tribe," as you put it, seems to be relatively unavoidable if we are going to discuss much in the way of evidence for Paleolithic (hunter-gatherer) nutrition. While double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical studies are considered the gold standard in nutritional science, these categories of evidence were apparently sufficient to get everyone here to try the diet. You see to draw mainly from category 3. What evidence convinced you to try it? If I missed any categories, please let me know.

There are several flaws with the above assumptions you've made.Palaeoanthroplogical evidence is very sparse and most such experts admit that the evidence is constantly changing(like that Neanderthal supposed  ZC-diet study which was subsequently found to be wrong given problems re bone-analysis).Then 2), the observational studies of modern tribes such as the Kitavans:- there have been too many changes, even in hunter-gatherer lifestyles between the Palaeolithic era and modern times, so that it is seriously misleading to cite such studies as they give a totally wrong impression of what the Palaeolithic era was like(as the latter had different climates etc.). The 3) option is the best as there are now 1,000s of  reliable studies re the dangers of cooking, and there are very gradual studies done on raw diets(only raw vegan so far).4), inductions/deductions drawn from human or animal physiology, is less reliable - I've noted for example  how both carnivores and vegans can give excellent, well thought out reasons for why humans are destined to be carnivores/herbivores(as applicable) but such arguments are too dodgy to be reliable as human morphology/digestive system is still not properly understood etc..5) and 6) , our own and others' experiences, is solid as an option and the one which draws most people into this sort of diet, I mean there are no reports of mass food-poisoning/mass parasitic infection in the raw foodist community, which is what one should expect if one is to believe standard cultural propaganda against raw animal foods.

My personal motivation was simply this:- I had tried every possible dietary combination, prior to rawpalaeo, except for cooked zero-carb(couldn't do it as I found the higher my intake of cooked animal food was in my diet, the worse my health became), so there was only raw vegan/frutiarian, and when that failed, only RVAF diets left. I was never motivated by mention of the Inuit and while I found the palaeo mythology amusingly enticing I didn't take it seriously, I just wanted to rebuild my health.

The way I see it, most people will come to RVAF diets by 1 of 2 means. Either they will read some of the many mainstream studies which feature on major news sites such as the BBC focusing on the harm done by grilled foods etc. or they will do what I did, and simply travel through the various diets until they reach the RVAF diet option, in which case, their motivation will be mainly testiomonials from long-term RVAFers re success of the diet. The former would be the mainstream approach and the latter the unconventional approach.

[TylerDurden]

I'm beginning to think you want to be regarded as fringe. This line of argument virtually guarantees no progress, or at the very least is the best possible way to retard progress.

Since virtually every human being on the planet eats cooked food for the majority of their diet, and the average industrialized human still manages to live longer than at any point in recorded history, claiming that they have to prove their diet's efficacy over one that hasn't obtained since pre-civilizational times is laughably absurd to anyone not already a firm believer in raw. In pop-science, the burden of proof is on the paradigm changer, which is, in this case, raw. In real science, the burden of proof is on the claimaint period, regardless of what they are claiming. If you make a positive assertion that raw is better, you must prove it.

So far, the primary claims have not so much been re the benefits of raw but on the negatives associated with cooking, which have been amply demonstrated in mainsteam science. Simply put, if one can show how strong the argument is against the opposing side(ie against cooking) then that vindicates the other opposing side(ie  raw)(unless you're suggesting there is some 3rd state, separate from raw or cooked!).

In short, we are now in a situation where most scientists and nutritionists(albeit reluctantly) admit the harm done by well-cooked foods(particularly well-cooked animal foods). We have ample evidence re specific harm done by heat-created toxins on human tissue and proof that lowering AGE-levels reduces AGE-related conditions - there have even been studies showing how certain types of heat-created toxins(such as heterocyclic amines) are also found in cigarette-smoke, and smoking has already been conclusively established as harmful within the scientific community, and now there's extensive research on the benefits of bacteria, which just happen to be in abundance in raw foods. So, the pro-cooking camp is in real trouble.

The arguments re humans living longer in recent years is irrelevant to the discussion for the following reason, that substantial medical technology has been the prime instigator behind that, not diet. Humans were eating cooked food both before and after the increase in lifespan so that factor  was not relevant.

[alphagruis]

 I agree that a raw v cooked study will be difficult to do given the cultural biases towards cooked food. A real test might not take place in my lifetime, if it ever does. However, that does not change the status of the hypothesis. The reality of the situation is that until a comparison study is done to confirm the hypothesis, it remains a hypothesis. Which is really all I'm trying to point out here.

 We don't deal here with a mathematical conjecture such as the famous second Fermat's theorem that indeed remained just a conjecture and nothing more for several centuries until it was finally proven by Wiles.
The raw versus cooked hypothesis is a matter of life science. In life science as in physics every hypothesis or even the best of our theories are just working tools that can be used as long as they are not falsified, i.e. proven to make predictions at odds with experiment. Useful theories have to make testable predictions otherwise they are laught at because they are "not even wrong" as Pauli put it.
So either the "raw"  or the present dominant "cooked" hypotheses may just be falsified rather than ever definitely "proven" in the future.
So I'm afraid that even the basic raw versus cooked experiment we talked about would not really settle the issue. As I already pointed out previously it would be sharpely criticized by the losing camp in all its technical details and every experiment has weak technical features, in particular in life science.  It would just give one more piece of evidence (admittedly a strong one) against one or the other camp.

I claim that, based on all the evidence at hand, it is scientifically at least as sound to adopt the "raw" hypothesis as my present working hypothesis rather than the "cooked" one. I can't see any serious falsifying data against it, whereas dark clouds have accumulated now over the "cooked" one. I belong to a minority, well, don't bother me, that's just the way science works until the next change of paradigm.

So both the raw and the cooked are just hypotheses, and the cooked one has certainly no stronger scientific basis than the raw one, it just happens that it's the dominant one.

Of course if the burden of "proof" means the struggle to get consensus it is obviously on the raw side. Humans have indeed thrived on cooked diets as never before (nearly 7 billions peoples), since the neolithic revolution. So from a short sighted darwinian point of view our species has succeeded in a tremendous way. Yet exponential growth is unsustainable and darwinian success and health status are not the same thing.

    
  

[alphagruis]

Actually we do. It is possible to estimate the rough age of bones on a scientific basis, and my figure re Maoris is quite correct.

No, YOU do...

As for me everything in this respect is highly questionable and uncertain.

You state it yourself in your reply to PaleoPhil:

"Palaeoanthroplogical evidence is very sparse and most such experts admit that the evidence is constantly changing" 

http://ryan-koch.blogspot.com/2009/05/reality-of-primitive-peoples-lifespan.html

The paper referred to in this blog doesn't support the "Nasty, Brutish and Short" ideology at all

[TylerDurden]

You are making the classic short-sighted mistake of all Price devotees in that you are suggesting that evidence from a closer era re modern tribes is as good as evidence from far away times such as in the Palaeo era. Clearly, evidence from palaeo times is inevitably going to be less substantial and clear-cut given the extra millennia involved, plus there were different practices in palaeo times(Ie no grain-eating such as happened with the Maoris). While evidence from closer periods can indeed be sketchy of itself, scientific analysis of aging in bones seems to be more rigorous than scientific measuring of diet via bone-analysis.

Incidentally, there is plenty of evidence re Maori low life expectancy(lower than in Palaeo times) plus lower fertility etc. I went over this before, providing links:-

"In my haste last time I forgot to check a couple of websites. Anyway,
it turns out that the severe collapse in the Maori population after
the colonists arrived, appears to have been not only due to being
shifted onto swamp-land etc.,like I stated earlier, but also to do
with the fact that there was a large reduction in the amount of
animal food available to them as a result of this transfer, so that
they depended mostly on the grains in the ancient Maori diet, such
as sweet potatoes(kumara),ferns etc., which caused a devastating
collapse in health. So we basically have 2 periods. One, centuries
before the colonists arrived, where Maoris suffered a significant
decrease in health after turning to a moderate extent to grain
products via agriculture, and then very nearly dying out after
switching to mainly grain products over a period of a few decades. So
it wasn't a transition to refined Western-type refined foods that
almost killed off the Maori population(despite what Price claimed), but the grain in the diet.

Geoff

--- In rawpaleodiet@yahoogroups.com, "Geoff" <geoffpurcell@...> wrote:
>
> Actually, there's plenty of evidence to show that the Maoris were
in
> a poor state of health in pre-colonial times. It seems that the
> Maoris followed a mainly meat/fat/fish diet, with very little
> veg/fruit, up to c.1500 AD, after which they turned to agriculture
to
> some extent, eating grain such as manioc, sweet potatoes, as well
as
> ferns etc., at which point their health suffered dramatically(note
> that they still had very high portions of seafood in their diet, at
> the time).
>
> Here's an excerpt from the Net re this:-
>
> "The harshness of the Maori diet meant low life expectancy, high
> infant mortality, and low fertility" (Olssen & Stenson, 1989: 4).
> from:-
>
> http://www.rcnz.org.nz/resources/fnf/a99.htm
>
>
> The following 2 websites go on about the gradual decrease in height
> of (pre-1769)Maori skeletons, over the centuries, as they turned to
> eating grains, including a few mentions of frequent stomach-tumours
> in the Maori population, and the excessive wearing of teeth,
> especially molars, due to consumption of plant foods. They do have
> one or two nice things to say about Maori health, but mostly they
> mention the low rate of life-expectancy(25-30 years), the low
> fertility, the high susceptibility to disease etc in pre-colonial
> times:-
>
> http://tinyurl.com/gs5oy
>
> http://tinyurl.com/kk5vu
>
>
> The major cause of Maori near-extinction appears to be the arrival
of
> the colonists carrying new diseases, to which they weren't resistant
> (due to bad grain-filled diet?), and the British tendency to put
> Maoris on swamp-land reservations, which encouraged the spread of
> disease even more. This is similiar to the New World, where Indian
> tribes similiarly contracted disease within a couple of decades of
> contact with white settlers, long before they actually turned to
> Western-style diets.(The Maoris actually only turned to Western-
style
> diets c.1900, according to the Net, some time after the threat of
> extinction had passed. I won't deny that their
grain/fish "primitive"
> diet was better than a refined-foods diet, but, given the evidence,
a
> Palaeo diet is undoubtedly better than a Weston-Price grain- (or
> dairy-)-filled diet).
>
> Geoff"

[PaleoPhil]

There are several flaws with the above assumptions you've made.Palaeoanthroplogical evidence is very sparse and most such experts admit that the evidence is constantly changing....

I do wish you would stop making assumptions about what you think I really mean instead of taking my words at face value, Tyler. I never said anywhere that any of the evidence categories was without flaw. I only meant that those are all the categories that I'm aware of--the quality of the evidence varies. If you have others feel free to add them.

I agree that most people are convinced by 5 and 6--their own experience or that of others (especially if they see them improve first-hand). It's not scientific, but personal experience is generally the most convincing. My own experience was the main convincer for me too.

My personal motivation was basically the same as yours--I had tried pretty much everything else and then happened upon forums where people were talking about gluten and dairy elimination helping their IBS (I had IBS-C). I checked out the published studies on this and they were very encouraging. I was still skeptical (as usual), so I asked my primary care physician about it and he actually encouraged me to try it (he had quite a refreshingly open mind compared to my prior PCP). I decided to give it a shot. It worked better than my wildest dreams, so I looked into why and found out about the Paleo diet. Having studied biological evolution, Paleo made sense to me, so I gave it a shot and improved further.

I learned about the Inuit later on. They were not a motivation for me either--their example did help explain it and revealed interesting things I didn't know about, like the potential to do well on high fat diets, some raw meats/organs and high meat (along with Ray Audette, Aajonus, William, DelFuego and Lex). I'm rather skeptical, conservative, and independent, so I usually don't try anything different until I've found multiple confirming sources and I never dogmatically follow the example of a single group or guru. I noticed that more and more Paleo dieters were having problems with carbs and/or cooked foods on broad Paleo diets--including myself--whereas other people like William and Geoff Purcell were doing much better on more restricted diets. I reviewed what I had been eating when I was doing best in the early days of my Paleo diet when I was keeping a food diary. I found I had been eating mostly wild salmon, bison, pork chops, raw beef jerky and other (cooked) meats with some raw fruits and raw green salads. I did some more investigating and found DelFuego and Lex and eventually wound up here.

So please don't assume that anyone tried RPD solely because of the Inuit or any other tribe. Instead, why not ask them what their actual individual reasons were--you may be surprised by the answers you get. In your and my case we had the same basic reason.

[alphagruis]

You are making the classic short-sighted mistake of all Price devotees in that you are suggesting that evidence from a closer era re modern tribes is as good as evidence from far away times such as in the Palaeo era.

Useless babble.

While evidence from closer periods can indeed be sketchy of itself, scientific analysis of aging in bones seems to be more rigorous than scientific measuring of diet via bone-analysis.

"

Baseless statements

[TylerDurden]

Useless babble.

Not at all. It is simple fact that Price devotees mostly assume that evidence from palaeo times is indistinguishable from evidence from tribes nearer to our modern era and often claiming it's of the same quality. A good example is Sally Fallon's baseless insistence that salt was consumed in palaeo times.

Baseless statements

An absurd choice of words. Just do a basic search and you'll find multiple sources showing how easy it is to determine the age of bones(unsurprising given advances in recent years in forensic science), eg:-

http://main.uab.edu/show.asp?durki=45647

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WH8-45J5675-1T&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1045909511&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=f421ec2796c6bf735fe275470be338bd

I suppose this now belongs in hot topics, given the post above this one.

[TylerDurden]

One of my main concerns re Price, I should make clear, is that by promoting Price's views/claims one is generally promoting a cooked, neolithic diet as that is what he basically proposed(or at least suggesting that Price's diet is  not  unhealthy). Sure, he also promoted consumption of some raw animal foods(though apparently in some moderation, with the exception of raw dairy) but the diet was largely cooked, with hefty amounts of fermented grains, tubers and the like.So, in a sense, Price's diet or the general hunter-gatherer diets of Neolithic-era tribes, being both largely cooked and mostly Neolithic, are almost the polar opposite of rawpalaeo in concept.

[alphagruis]

I agree that most people are convinced by 5 and 6--their own experience or that of others (especially if they see them improve first-hand). It's not scientific, but personal experience is generally the most convincing. My own experience was the main convincer for me too.

I'm deeply convinced that various personal experiences are actually one of the most important evidence at hand, among all the sources of evidence of your list, PaleoPhil. When Seignalet (or others) reports hundreds of patients improved by his diet it is scientifically significant. When many people such as Lex Rooker report about their dietary experience in a journal it is scientifically significant when some organizational principle finally emerges.  
As a physicist I claim that it is utterly wrong that only "double blinded clinical investigations" might provide scientifically meaningful data with respect to diet. That's just bullshit babble from short sighted pretentious hardboiled reductionnists, an approach, that physics itself has now shown to be deeply insufficient, misleading and wrong. Unfortunately the news has not yet been received by the majority of life scientists and certainly not by most doctors.
Appropriate diet and health are emergent phenomena, i.e. a non trivial collective result dependant on many intertwinned factors that cannot be simply varied independently or held constant at will, as in standard reductionnist approach,  without being fooled by the outcome. Symptoms of bad studies are always the same: conflicting, non reproducible, confusing results. Sadly, the rule rather than the exception in many modern life science studies.

In other words it is an illusion to believe that dietary issues may be readily settled by experiments designed according to the same reductionnist principles as the study of the vibrations in the wings of a B 747 airplane.

Unfortunately things in life science are much more involved and we have to invoke and take advantage of much less direct evidence.
  
    

[PaleoPhil]

I'm deeply convinced that various personal experiences are actually one of the most important evidence at hand, among all the sources of evidence of your list, PaleoPhil. When Seignalet (or others) reports hundreds of patients improved by his diet it is scientifically significant. When many people such as Lex Rooker report about their dietary experience in a journal it is scientifically significant when some organizational principle finally emerges.  
As a physicist I claim that it is utterly wrong that only "double blinded clinical investigations" might provide scientifically meaningful data with respect to diet.

Good point. I guess I should have said that 5 and 6 are not regarded as "scientific" by the current crop of scientists and under the current general understanding of science. I probably shouldn't have assumed that people would understand I meant that. I think anecdotal evidence was probably more highly regarded in the past before science became more formalized, and who knows what the future holds. Still, I'm willing to concede to the scientists that 5 and 6 are not "scientific" in today's general sense of the word. I still find them personally very useful and I think most honest scientists would admit they do provide even them with some value--such as clues as to what they should be investigating next (if they can get the funding).

[alphagruis]

I think anecdotal evidence was probably more highly regarded in the past before science became more formalized, and who knows what the future holds. Still, I'm willing to concede to the scientists that 5 and 6 are not "scientific" in today's general sense of the word. I still find them personally very useful and I think most honest scientists would admit they do provide even them with some value--such as clues as to what they should be investigating next (if they can get the funding).

Yes, absolutely. It is an unfortunate situation that life scientists began to emulate reductionist physics with his methods (and relevant undeniable successes) by the 1960's and still do so today. Now that, ironically, physics has clearly demonstrated the drastic limitations of this approach and its clearcut inadequacy in complex systems such as living organisms as well as the need to adopt a global collective emergent point of view in the latter.
A nice exemple of such global point of view or concept of emergence is precisely in the title of this forum RAW PALEO. This conveys higher organisation principles that do not refer to any molecular components of food (no need to even know that such things exist) and just tells us something about the appropriate higher organisation level namely which natural real food we might eat (land animals, fishs, vegetables, nuts, berries, insects... no grains, no dairy) and in which form ( raw rather than processed). This is in sharp contrast with the usual reductionist point of view where mainstream life science attempts to define an appropriate diet in terms of specific molecular components such as fatty acids, amino acids, vitamins, sugars  etc. The ridiculous confusion and failure generated by the latter reductionist approach is clear enough. And so is the much more successful, attractive and astonishingly efficient character of the former higher level emergent point of view.

No, don't let reductionist mainstream life scientists tell you what good science is, they do really not know what they speak about.

As you point it out, PaleoPhil, scientists could learn a lot from the raw paleo experiment and get very valuable clues from it.
       

[PaleoPhil]

Fascinating. I hadn't thought about it much before, but was there a specific turning point in the 1960s when reductionism was adopted and was there an individual or group that got the scientific community to embrace it?

[alphagruis]

It was the general trend after 1950 with the discovery of the DNA structure by James Watson and Francis Crick and later on a gene regulation mechanism by François Jacob and Jacques Monod. This led to the development of molecular biology an approach which reduces essentially life to genes and other remarkable molecules. Nothing is wrong with the reductionist statement that living organisms are made of molecules (This helps a lot to understand why raw is most likely better than cooked). It is just that this doesn't mean that knowledge of the properties of these molecules is akin to understand life. Human and other species's genomes have now been sequenced but this did not reveal the secret of life which not in any part but belongs to the whole.
Well I'm afraid this digression led us far away from the initial subject of this thread. Thanks for your interest.   

[PaleoPhil]

More science that refutes the lifespan canard:

Gurven, Michael and Kaplan, Hillard 2007. Hunter-gatherer longevity: cross-cultural perspectives. Population and Development Review 33: 321-365.
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf

"The average modal age of adult death for hunter-gatherers is 72 with a range of 68–78 years. This range appears to be the closest functional equivalent of an “adaptive” human life span. Departures from this general pattern in published estimates of life expectancy in past populations (e.g., low child and high adult mortality) are most likely due to a combination of high levels of contact-related infectious disease, excessive violence or homicide, and methodological problems that lead to poor age estimates of older individuals and inappropriate use of model life tables for deriving demographic estimates."

You would think this would be enough to kill the canard, but I doubt it. Critics of raw Paleo and similar diets just keep mindlessly repeating "nasty, brutish and short" like a religious mantra, and that seems to satisfy them. Anything to keep from having to challenge their cherished beliefs or expend some mental effort, apparently.