“Two seemingly benign nutritional maxims are at the root of all dietary evil: A calorie is a calorie, and You are what you eat. Both ideas are now so entrenched in public consciousness that they have become virtually unassailable. As a result, the food industry, aided and abetted by ostensibly well-meaning scientists and politicians, has afflicted humankind with the plague of chronic metabolic disease, which threatens to bankrupt health care worldwide.”
We’ve had the green revolution. Now we need a new revolution in food tech that provides adequate healthy food for the world.
[Update a few minutes later]
“Is this any way to lose weight?” Yes. I’ve been eating like this for a year and a half, and I’ve lost ten pounds (though that wasn’t the goal). Fat doesn’t make you fat. Carbs do.
[Early afternoon update]
A testimonial from Bruce Webster.
I’ve used the paleo diet off and on for several years, and it works for me. The problem I have with it full on is feeling well enough long enough to cook the meals. So I try to be a modified sort of thing, which sounds like what this diet is.
I’ve suggested that kind of diet to other people and they just can’t wrap their heads around it. My son and daughter-in-law lasted two days. And when I asked them why, they said they got tired of being hungry. Which I didn’t understand! So when I asked them why they were hungry or what they were eating, they said,
“…one egg and one piece of bacon for breakfast, a small said and half a can of tuna in water for lunch (yuck, tuna in water!), and half a boneless skinless chicken breast for supper…”
I told them NOT to limit how much they were eating and they had tried to tell me that if that diet worked, it should work eating just a little food instead of a lot. I never could convince them they messed it up. And I’ve had the same almost exact argument with other people. I tried to steered to that way of eating.
Ultimately my daughter-in-law had gastric bypass surgery. Now she’s lost about 110 lbs and she looks like she just left a concentration camp! She’s sick all the time and complains that all her joints are achy.
I’ve lost over 100 lbs in 3 1/2 years mostly by eating better. More veggies and more meat. But I still eat anything I want. But does anyone really ‘need’ a super large order of fries? I find out I’m better off with more meat / fish / chicken, and less fries. Add in a salad, I’m way more than happy.
And thinner too. Much like Rand said, I didn’t start this as a a weight loss regimen either, but I ain’t barking at that added attraction.
Since I am in great shape I have tried to give advice to a few overweight people – eat like me, look like me. The response I get is “You’ve never been fat so you don’t know how to loose weight”. So, fat people will only take advise from other fat people? Me, I only listen to people who look like Spartan warriors.
I cut back on carbs, and have deliberately not counted calories, and I haven’t even been “paleo” or “Atkins” or anything, just snacking on yogurt instead of potato chips or whatnot. I’ve lost 17 pounds between early December and the weekend before Memorial Day (I’m still recovering a little from Memorial Day weekend). I don’t exercise, have a sedentary job, and travel 5 days a week for work for the last 5 months. Diet change has been the entire thing, and I’ve even been craving fewer sugary snacks because I’m not OD’ing on carbs all the time.
I’ve cut back on carbs, starch and sugar as well. Not eliminated, just dialed back. Down from a high of 255 6 mos ago to 230 now and aiming for something around 215-20, ought to be sufficient for 6’1″. Not doing much in the way of exercise other than walking and have an office job with a 3 hr round trip commute daily.
Carbs make you fat? Quick! Tell all those skinny people in China, India, and Japan to stop eating so much rice! Get those fat Africans to … Wait, what fat Africans?
Carbs don’t make you fat. That’s retarded. We’ve been eating carbs for millennia and only sufferered from an obesity crisis in the last century. About the same time that we also started suffering from diabetes, heart disease and food allergies.
These are all symptoms of a slow metabolism and poor glucose handling. Removing carbs reduces the symptoms for a little while but doesn’t fix anything.
Actually there are a number of poor societies that have diets of mostly rice and beans and have high rates of obesity (particularly among women). The Hopi Native Americans when first encountered by western settlers looking for gold where described as being healthy, fit, and lean. Their diets were mainly fish from a major river and wild game that was attracted by the water. Unfortunately, the river was diverted by the western settlers and with it a major source of protein was lost to the Hopi. The government began giving them rations of flour and sugar (because it was cheap) and the obesity rate among the Hopi went up to 70% within a generation.
If a calorie isn’t a calorie, then what is it? Seriously, every time this comes up, I see an awful lot of handwaving and never anything resembling an acknowledgement that conservation of energy exists. And, given the limited energy-conversion options available in the human body, there aren’t that many relevant terms in the conservation equation. A food calorie ingested is either excreted without digestion (rare, and you won’t like the side effects), transformed to work, transformed to heat, or retained as mass. So if you’re somehow not gaining weight on your high-calorie but carb-free (or fat-free, whatever) diet, where’s the energy going?
I will also note that all the standard metabolic pathways converge fairly early on at acetyl-CoA, and the non-standard pathways mostly bypass acetyl-CoA with roughly equal efficiency for specialized purposes, so it is going to take more than handwaving to convince me that the source of the biologically available energy will have any significant effect on its subsequent disposition.
Eat less, exercise more. I’m all for anything better than that equation, but I will be checking the math. And the simple version works. I’ve lost seventy pounds, and kept it off, eating less of the same foods I’ve always eaten along with 30-60 minutes of cardio per day.
If paleo helps you eat less, good for you. Now back on the treadmill 🙂
Treadmills are an awful form of exercise.
A “calorie” is what’s been determined by bomb calorimetry, not the energy actually extracted by a cascading series of hormonally-sensitive cascading enzymatic reactions, to say nothing of the effects of long-term inflammation due to poorly-tolerated proteins and novel chemistry from modern food processing.
For those of you who didn’t understand what I meant by “handwaving”, Leon has provided a perfect, concise example.
Fine, read Taubes, he expresses the counterargument better than I can.
What you suggest doesn’t work for 95% of people that try it. Congratulations on being part of the elite 5%.