Tyler, I hate to take up so much of your personal journal with scientific debate, so if you want to move this to a separate topic thread, feel free.
There's that famous study which showed that the Masai had atherosclerosis tendencies in their arteries, despite(because of?) their low-carb diets:-
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/95/1/26
Yes, but they didn't develop heart disease or have high overall mortality rates from heart disease and other diseases of civilization. Plus, there is the confounding variable of high dairy consumption. Many of the studies I cite have zero to moderate dairy consumption and I don't eat dairy. So the clogged arteries of the Masai don't appear to be relevant to me, specifically.
Re the mention of exercise alleviating certain symptoms of inflammation/heart-disease:- 1 thing I'm annoyed about when people mention tribes like the Eskimoes or the Masai is that they mostly ignore the fact that such tribes all had a level of exercise/physical activity which was far greater than the sedentary lifestyle of Westerners....
Yes, there you have a good point. That is a potentially confounding variable. However, there is also evidence that exercise does not do much to improve heart disease survival rates:
Exercise no help for heart failure patients: 'Disappointing' study found that working out didn't improve survival rates
The Associated Press
updated 5:27 p.m. ET, Tues., Nov. 11, 2008
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27667661/
NEW ORLEANS - Exercise can do a lot of good for most people, but it apparently isn’t much help to those with heart failure, the fastest-growing heart problem in the United States.
Plus, all these hunter-gatherers tended to have very short lifespans so simply didn't have the time to develop the usual health-problems gained on a cooked diet in a Western nation, such as diabetes type 2 etc.
Wow, I can't believe that you as a Paleo dieter are bringing up that old canard again that was refuted long ago. Why do you eat Paleo if you don't believe that avoiding dairy, grains and legumes reduces the risk of diseases of civilization? Why not call your diet a raw nonallergenic diet or some such thing? Increasingly you've been sounding like the critics of Paleo dieting, but that may well be because we've only had a couple of posters here recently who advocated nonPaleo positions like near-fruitarianism and pro-raw-dairy and you haven't had a chance to defend Paleo against critics. Let me offer you an opportunity to be more positive about Paleo. You've spoken about what you find nonsensical about pro-Paleo diet arguments, what do you find makes sense about the Paleo aspect of RPD?
Actually, average human life expectancies DECLINED a bit when Stone Age hunter-gatherers adopted an agrarian lifestyle at the start of the Neolithic era. The later increases in life expectancy were mainly due to public health achievements such as better sanitation, safer food, effective systems of quarantine, immunizations and improved childbirth survival rates.
It is true that hunter-gatherers studied during modern times do not have as great an average lifespan as those values found in industrialized nations. However, most deaths among adults in hunter-gatherer societies are related to accidents and trauma from living in the wild without modern medical care, as opposed to the chronic degenerative diseases that afflict modern societies. Thirty three years was the AVERAGE life expectancy of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer male, not the maxiumum life expectancy (and as William has pointed out, newer techniques of estimating age from bones are increasing the estimates of past lifespans). A hunter gatherer who survived childbirth, infectious disease, accidents, battles, and wild animals could be expected to live into his/her 60s and possibly beyond.
According to Loren Cordain, "In most hunter-gatherer populations today, approximately 10-20% of the population is 60 years of age or older. These elderly people have been shown to be generally free of the signs and symptoms of chronic disease (obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels) that universally afflict the elderly in western societies. When these people adopt western diets, their health declines and they begin to exhibit signs and symptoms of 'diseases of civilization.'" (“FAQs,”
http://thepaleodiet.com/faqs/)
See also:
Longevity & health in ancient Paleolithic vs. Neolithic peoples: Not what you may have been toldby Ward Nicholson
http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/angel-1984/angel-1984-1a.shtml EXCERPT: <<Special update as of April 1999: LATE-BREAKING ADVANCES IN PALEOPATHOLOGICAL AGE-ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES have suggested that studies based on earlier techniques (as in the paper discussed here) may underestimate the age at death of older individuals and overestimate that of younger individuals. It's possible the range of estimation errors involved could be substantial. Thus, the profile of age-distribution results in compilation studies like the one discussed below may be flattened or compressed with respect to "true age.">>
Paleo Longevity ReduxLetter to the Editor
By Jeff D. Leach
Public Health Nutrition: 10(11), 1336–1337
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPHN%2FPHN10_11%2FS1368980007814492a.pdf&code=c563005ad02c96173592b187924f0996This is why I'm so against the absurd starry-eyed Weston-Price-derived nonsense that is routinely peddled.
I think the reason that WAPF people tend to be so rabid and impervious to reason is that they have a powerful profit motive driving their support of raw dairy and whole grains (despite the fact that some of the peoples that Price studied ate neither): their organization is funded by raw-dairy and whole-grain farmers and many members are such farmers themselves. As a result, I have found it generally pointless to try to engage them in discussion about raw dairy or whole grains. I was shocked, for example, at the way Sally Fallon tore into Loren Cordain at a Paleo forum, despite his unflappable politeness. Their profit-generated zeal and rage often carry over to the rank-and-file that they convince. I sometimes try to engage these people, but generally regret doing so, including a very recent case.
So in a sense I don't blame the WAPF people, because they are trying to defend their economic survival. I don't agree with it, but it is understandable. It's easier for someone like Cordain or you or me to be reasonable about these matters because our livelihood is not based on the diets we advocate. Cordain, for example, is going to get his university salary regardless of what diet he promotes and if he modifies his dietary recommendations he could probably still publish an additional book or two (a la D'Adamo). In contrast, if Fallon were to abandon raw dairy and whole grains, the raw-dairy and whole-grain farmers would cease funding the WAPF.
*incidentally, I should add that (cooked) ketogenic diets are well-known to produce side-effects. I believe kidney-stones are 1 frequently cited example.
It's only anecdotal, but my dark, particle-filled urine and chronic kidney stones problems went away when I adopted a gluten-free, dairy-free cooked Paleo diet.
1 other thing. As you stated above, most tribes like the inuit did eat fermented foods and raw meats(sometimes aged) which would offset nasty side-effects from eating cooked foods. Plus, they would have frequently had to resort to caloric restriction during famine-periods, and it's well-known that (other than eating raw) the only relatively effective way to reduce the load of heat-created toxins in the body(from eating cooked foods) is go in for caloric restriction.
These are your best points yet and underline the need for more study. I agree with you that raw and low-cooked foods do seem to be healthier anecdotally and in population surveys than modern cooking techniques. We need clinical studies on this.
The point is that cooked low-carb diets like Kwasniewski and Atkins are deeply problematic,
I don't think people here disagree with you about cooked diets, it's your singling out of low-carb cooked diets that I think some of us take issue with, since high-carb cooked diets have been demonstrated time and again to be even more unhealthful than low-carb cooked diets. As I mentioned before, Gary Taubes wrote a massive (600+ page) book on the subject, though I suspect you might a priori dismiss his writings because he eats a cooked diet that includes dairy and he is dismissive of Paleo (his book gives focuses on one point which some Paleo researchers made that he disagrees with and ignores the more important contributions of the field, and it gives the impression that Boyd Eaton is the only major researcher in the field, giving short shrift to researchers who are currently more active in the field, such as Cordain, Lindeberg, Phinney and others). Despite these weaknesses, I find the book valuable for the extensive historical research it includes and the mountain of evidence it analyzes and references.
Your ignoring of the accumulating evidence on this is puzzling. I don't think you differ nearly so much in practice from us than you do in rhetoric. I suspect that your own diet is lower-carb than the SAD, Ornish and Mediterranean diets, yet for some reason you have failed to respond to my inquiries on this.
not just because so many of the gurus recommend processed foods or supplements(atkins-style low-carb candy-bars for example)
That's something I've heard conflicting stories on. I have no personal interest in defending Atkins (I think Atkins made a huge mistake by advocating unlimited dairy, for example--though my personal experience does bias me on that issue, as you've pointed out), but was it Atkins himself who advocated that candy bar crap, or the corporation that he sold the rights to his name to? At times it sounds like the Atkins Corp. may differ from Atkins himself in similar ways that the WAPF differs from Weston A. Price. I skimmed Atkins' first book and it's amazing how different it is from the popular perception in the mass media and from the processed products that the Atkins Corp. sells.
I'll grant that something like Cordain's cooked palaeolithic diet is quite a lot better by comparison to the others as he routinely mentions ways to limit the creation of heat-created toxins via cooking, plus he warns people away from dairy, grains and legumes, something which, just by itself, would greatly lessen auto-immune-related symptoms. That said, the very fact that he recommends lightly-cooked meats means that people are still ingesting inflamation-causing heat-created toxins such as AGEs, so it's still pretty poor (though, again, unlike fools like Kwasniewski, Cordain at least has the sense not to promote consumption of vast amounts of cooked animal fats, no doubt partly because he is aware of the fact that heating animal fats causes far more heat-created toxins to form than in any other type of food.
I agree, and here some of your reasons for supporting Paleo are revealing themselves--nondairy, no grains or legumes, and lower-cooked. So don't you then agree that the Paleo diets of Cordain, Lindeberg, Phinney and others that tend to be lower-carb, lower-glycemic, cooked at lower temps, and include less hydrogenated plant oil fats are likely healthier than the SAD and Mediterranean diets they have trounced in the studies and wouldn't you think that by avoiding dairy, grains and legumes we might lower our risk for modern chronic diseases and that this might help explain why the remains of Stone Agers older than 30 years have been found to be generally free of such diseases, except for rare cases of "wear-and-tear" arthritis?
Another obvious point is that even a cooked low-carb diet, however intrinsically unhealthy in the long-term, , may well potentially provide a few
benefits in the short-term, simply by avoiding highly-processed foods/trans-fats and the like - but that's not an endorsement, really.
There is more study evidence for long term benefits of cooked low-carb diets (the Framingham study comes to mind, though it tends to get misrepresented by proponents of high-carb, who basically ignore what the actual data says) than for all-raw diets, yet I don't abandon raw dieting on that basis. This just points to the need for research on all-raw diets (but don't hold your breath waiting for that
).
For me, the real test, though, is longevity.
I think that longevity is one of the great misleaders. Longevity tends to be promoted far more by sanitation, wealth, access to medical care, drugs and machines than healthy diets. But at a great cost of suffering from chronic disease. A better test, less confounded by such variables, is the rates of chronic disease at equal ages in populations on different diets. Even better is a clinical test in which most confounding variables are controlled for. Still better for my own personal needs is my own actual experience.
