Palaeolithic/Paleolithic / Caveman / Paleo Diet / Paleodiet

[webslave]

raw legumes are hazardous to human health.

I eat raw peanuts and snow peas all the time, with no apparent health effects. So do millions of other humans.

"As with everything in life, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. We have known for over half a century that lentils and beans have the highest levels of lectins and therefore can make us sick if we eat them raw. ["Toxicity of raw kidney beans", Jaffe WG, Experientia 5 (1949) 81]."

The operative word there is "can". Raw kidney beans will definitely make you sick, and so will some unprocessed roots, like cassava, which the paleo diet endorses. But you cannot say all raw legumes will make you sick. That's patently incorrect.

You originally said a paleo diet is a low carbohydrate diet.

I modified that statement. Not sure why you keep harping on it.

It's not a low Gi diet either. None of the plant foods i mentioned are low GI.

That may be true, but the doyens of paleo diet, like Cordain, claim it to be low GI. E.g. from http://thepaleodiet.com/archives/3789

Here is a list of references which show cancer to be rare in hunter gatherers and less westernized populations, which typically consume higher protein, low glycemic load, low salt, high n-3, and high fruits and vegetables.

on the same page, Cordain's colleague Ben Balzer states, without Cordain's disagreement:

This is because the Paleo diet includes most of the standard features universally accepted as being beneficial in diet= low GI, high omega 3, low omega 6, high in vitamins, high on fibre etc etc.

So given that, we can safely assume that the paleo diet is supposed to be low GI and that the high GI foods you mention are not supposed to be eaten in bulk.

It's very possible and probably likely that some small amount of lectins and other antinutrients remain in the legumes after soaking and cooking, which in susceptible people may cause digestive issues associated with lectin consumption. This has been my clinical experience, especially in people with autoimmune diseases.

It's a bit rich for someone of your tender age, without medical training (a nutrition degree is not medical training), to start advising people to avoid complete food groups based on your limited "experience", and without any mainstream studies specifically advising the avoidance of these food groups (e.g. properly cooked legumes).

I have a degree in the field of nutrition and have experience in this field working closely with clients dealing with health conditions.

Yet you promote eating patterns supported by only a tiny fraction of your nutritionist colleagues, and advise excluding entire food groups based on nothing but theories and a few studies by devotees. I can produce numerous studies showing properly cooked legumes are an important part of a wholesome, nutritious diet. Soybeans form a large part of the diets in Asia, for instance. All you can produce are the fringe studies by Loren Cordain (a person with qualifications in fitness and exercise!) and his ilk.

Bottom line for me is that the paleo diet is yet another fad diet of scant interest. It hits a few targets inadvertently, by excluding some problematic foods like gluten and dairy, but the rest of the theory is full of holes.

I also found your statements to be hypocritical considering that you run a website promoting a theory that has little scientific evidence to support it

We don't promote any theory exclusively. If you are referring to the Wise-Anderson Protocol, several studies published in Urology is not "little scientific evidence".

[webslave]

[webslave]

Animal protein-rich diets could be as harmful to health as smoking

People under 65 who eat a lot of meat, eggs and dairy are four times as likely to die from cancer or diabetes, study suggest

---

The Paleo diet wrong, according to new research: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/682587

---

Humans were eating grains and flour 32,000 years ago, recent research has shown.

---

Talking about meat, the paleo go-to food, get this:

Red meat cancer risk to be revealed by WHO

Red meat overconsumption = high colorectal cancer risk

---

Update on 4 Sep 2014: while I enjoy eating sugar, I have also had IBS to one degree or another all my life. I've now removed all sugars from my diet due to a recent discovery about the link between sugars and IBS. See viewtopic.php?f=51&t=8327

Bottom line: the paleo people may be right for reasons they don't fully understand.

---

Interesting comment from a researcher's site:

You can almost trace the change in thinking people who used to believe in Paleo. Paleo is now a ragtag band of meat-eaters who wanted to hear that there is nothing wrong with gorgoing themselves with redmeat. Some of these morons ended up with gout and their BUN skyrocketed. You can always tell when these morons post their blood labs on sites such as PaleoHacks and Mark's Daily Apple. Their BUN is over 25, their trigs are like 25, since they don't eat carbs, and their T3/Ft3 are just above the lower bound. What I've seen these morons develop over the years, after they've gone carbless for like 9 months, is immune deficiency. It's not the low thyroid. It's the low thymus, which results and is a sign of leptin deficiency, which triggers immune dysfunction. Check out some of these posts in the above forums. These people are developing all kinds of food allergies, autoimmune issues, cold hands, Raynaud's, allergic rhinitis, low body temperature, hormonal dysregulation with hypercortisolemia (which also results from leptin deficiency).

Check out these Paleotards' blood labs and you'll almost always see WBCs that are falling into the 3s, neutropenia and lymphocytopenia. And what's more intriguing: their globulin is almost always low-normal or just plain low -- a sign of low immunoglobulins that's consistent with immune deficiency induced by a thymus atrophy and low leptin.

Paleo is a health disaser and will be exposed as so in a few years. Some of these guys in the know are doing their best to keep these from surfacing, and those who follow the diet are just too stupid to realize that they're jeopardizing immune and hormonal health.