And the scientific justification for paleo is just false. Ancient humans did not eat that much meat.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but you put in a mostly off-topic plug for paleo, so a response was justified.
What about native Inuit populations whose diets were nearly 100% meat?
> Which hunter–gatherer tribe are we supposed to mimic, exactly? How do we reconcile the Inuit diet—mostly the flesh of sea mammals—with the more varied plant and land animal diet of the Hadza or !Kung? Chucking the many different hunter–gather diets into a blender to come up with some kind of quintessential smoothie is a little ridiculous.
Quoting one of the many counter-arguments from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet :
> recent understanding of the human genome has shown that modern humans typically have many copies of the AMY1 gene for starch digestion—suggesting widespread evolutionary adaptation to starch consumption by humans
We did all come from more temperate climates and in such places, plant food is much more easily available than meat. Also, in most temparate places hunting for wild animals with stone age tools and without horses is very difficult and it is very unlikely that the prehistoric humans could get much meat at all.
There are stone age tribes in Africa and Brazil, and they usually eat very little meat, because it is very hard to obtain.
As that possibility was widely disbelieved, the two of them spent a year on that diet in New York, with observers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson#Low-carbo... and the medical publication at http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf .
Others since then have done the same. Here's someone who's been on a meat diet for 5 years. http://www.vice.com/read/this-guy-has-eaten-nothing-but-raw-... .
Somewhere there is a flame war about what the Paleolithic humans ate, and whether that was what we are nicknaming "paleo" now. We shouldn't take the names too seriously, though, or we'll be confused about what the South Beach diet is (big macs?), the Beyonce diet (...?), etc. Low-fat and low-cholesterol diets have accurately descriptive names. Not catchy. Also once seemingly backed by science, which was incomplete enough to be wrong or influenced heavily by agricultural lobbyists.
An discussion about whether "reducing inflammation" as discussed on the internet is scientific would be interesting. The article mentions curcumin and omega-3s: what do we really know?
Weather or not the basis of Paleo is sound is not relevant to his point. Not only does he claim benefits for himself, but notes that others seem to agree in similar ways.
I'm really getting pissed at the commercial medial establishment for denying anything that doesn't have clinical trial can be good. Plants or minerals that have helped people for thousands of years are called "homeopathic" or "alternative" by real doctors. Now we're seeing studies that claim various things have no benefit "for people on an already healthy diet" as a footnote. Yet good old aspirin is a plant derivative, as are some other things. But I digress. His point is independent of the basis for the diet and hence should not be downvoted for that.
It took over 1,000 years for the humorism of Ancient Greece to be discarded as wrong, and Hippocrates' theories on bloodletting, once a mainstay of medicine, to be relegated to only a few modern uses.
Mercury has been a part of traditional medicines for thousands of years across Eurasia. "There is hardly a disease in the nosology for which mercury in some form has not been used." "No doubt many patients died after years of suffering from slow mercurial poisoning." (Quotes from http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020134syphilis... ) .
While mercury still has some medical uses, the fact is that centuries of reports claimed wide benefits and successes for mercury is evidence that claiming benefits for oneself, and the agreement of others, is not strong evidence that it actually is good. It may be good, but it isn't sufficient. It may actually be bad.
There's also drugs which we know are effective, but which are usually riskier and less effective than other drugs. Eg, sulfa drugs vs. beta-lactams. While treating with sulfa drugs absolutely has benefits, promoting it over other, better possibilities leads to overall worse healthcare. That's why sulfas aren't a first line drug any more.
In terms of a Paleo diet, it may be good, or not, or it may be that other diets are better.
How do you know which it is? How do you know which traditional uses of mercury are toxic? Which traditional uses of bloodletting are worse than not doing bloodletting at all? We only have three solutions: trials (which gives the clearest evidence when done right), epidemiology (much harder to interpret), and mechanistic (there's no reason to believe that a leg amputation will help a cold, and the best case outcome quite severe, making it unethical to test that experimentally. This is mostly used to reject unlikely possibilities which have poor evidence backing it.)
No, homeopathic medicin is called homeopathic by real doctors. Homeopathy is not ancient, it was invented in 1796. It also does not involve plants of any kind.
Plants that do help or seem to help and have been in use for hundreds or thousands of years are only called alternative when there either has not been research to show that they are effective, or there has been research that shows they are not effective.
Alternative does not necessarily mean bad. The word is merely used as a way to distinguish unproven medicine from scientifically proven medicine.
Nobody is "denying anything that doesn't have clinical trial can be good." Hardly. It is more like "these people say this is good, now lets prove it." Do we nees more medicinal research? Yes. Is there a billion things we don't understand or know yet? Yes. That doesn't mean we don't learn.
No, quite the opposite. But I also want people to stop rejecting things due to lack of evidence. If individuals or groups of people claim a benefit from something, why should that be rejected without proper investigation?
I stand by my claim that Iodine and Magnesium cured my asthma and I have test data to back it up. Will it work for you? I dunno. But your doctor is unlikely to recommend it and no company is going to do clinical trials.
> No, quite the opposite. But I also want people to stop rejecting things due to lack of evidence.
Science-based medicine is rejecting positive claims when there is insufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis. You can't claim that you want the oppose of abandoning evidence based medicine and simultaneously claim you want people to stop rejecting things due to lack of evidence.
> If individuals or groups of people claim a benefit from something, why should that be rejected without proper investigation?
There's a difference between rejecting something as a justified claim and rejecting it as a hypothesis for which there may be reason for further investigation -- the former is warranted more often than the latter, though even the latter can be warranted when, in addition to a lack of evidence for the claimed causal mechanism, there is a lack of evidence for the phenomenon it explains, or where there is evidence for the phenomenon but there is also sufficient evidence to conclude that an alternative cause to the proposed one was at work.
n=1 studies of treatments for medical conditions frequently suffer from either or both of these problems; particularly the first, as they generally lack sufficient evidence that improvement outside of the range plausible without any intervention occurred.
> I stand by my claim that Iodine and Magnesium cured my asthma and I have test data to back it up.
As iodine deficiency depresses immune function and asthma symptoms are commonly triggered by respiratory infections (either alone or in combination with other environmental factors), I don't think anyone concerned with evidence-based medicine would be surprised that there are people for whom increasing iodine intake reduced or eliminated asthma symptoms. Iodine also has other well-established effects that relate directly to known risk factors for asthma.
> But your doctor is unlikely to recommend it and no company is going to do clinical trials.
Sure, your doctor is unlikely, absent other evidence indicative of an iodine deficiency, to conclude that your asthma is due to an iodine deficiency and recommend that as an appropriate intervention. Because its not particularly likely to be true or an effective intervention.
OTOH, with symptoms that are more closely tied to an iodine deficiency, they are likely to test for that (and with test results showing such a deficiency, they are likely to recommend iodine to correct it.)
I imagine similar things are generally true of magnesium.
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/01/30/jane-says-if-you-...
When I go through my depression episodes I am unable to eat for days. Food tastes like cardboard and is repulsive. If i eat more than a couple bites I vomit. Yet not eating doesn't make me less depressed.
So the idea of just eliminating the current fad "inflammatory food" just doesn't seem plausible to me. Especially since the food seems to change with time.
Many people resent being told they "just need to cut out grains/meat/sugar/fruit/cooked food." Food fads come and food fads go.
Explain to me how that works.
The Paleo diet is about reducing inflammation, reducing toxins, and reducing anti-nutrients. The majority of the three of those comes from refined sugars, grains, seed oils, and legumes. What it DOESN'T do is blindly say "oh, our pre-agricultural ancestors ate that so it must be the best thing ever" because that has no place in Paleo as it is not scientific.
The article proves that Karl S. Kruszelnicki (I've never heard of him before) has no interest in doing research into what he is writing about, because he does not mention any of what I just said in his article.
Instead of taking a quick glance at the article... actually read it.
What that article did was a Strawman, and a rather popular one used to promote grain-based diets.
https://medium.com/the-nib/introducing-the-plio-diet-77d3dce...
I experienced the same results on strict Paleo. Strict as in, absolutely cooking everything myself in Coconut Oil - that strict.
I experienced a back injury and got off Predisone and Percocet within a month -- I owe largely to the inflammation reducing effects of the Paleo diet.
But theres no major study (besides the submitted link) that I'm aware of that links high inflammation diet to depression, even though, frankly, it's pretty obvious that there is some major link between the two.
So, until the above mentioned study happened, it was pretty much just a large collection of n=1 experiments, where people ate strict Paleo and then, well, became supermen (I'm not actually sure how else to describe it; for some, it was absolutely miraculous).
The ideal dietary ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has been recommended by an international panel of lipid experts to be approximately 2:1
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC533861/table/T2/
Canola oil is a good source of Omega-3 fatty acids (ALA). Among vegetable cooking oils, it is the best one. The fat composition is likely 'better' than olive oil.
However, one of Paleo's major goals is to eliminating inflammation, and Paleo, for a large number of people, have lessened or completely eliminated the symptoms of depression, and I've seriously considered that there has to be some sort of link.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted here. n=1 experimental data may not be the best thing, but in the absence of studies like the one linked to, its all we have to go on.