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Paleo Muffins - Episode 22
53 Plays9 years ago
Jenny talks about the Paleo Diet in terms of the anthropological community.
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introduction to Paleo Diet and Personal Experience
00:00:23
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Hello everybody, it's Jenny. Welcome back to the podcast. This is the 22nd episode of the Struggling Archaeologist's Guide to Getting Dirty, and this week we're going paleo. That's right, I'm sure you've all heard of it. The lifestyle slash fat slash diet slash, I don't even know, obsession.
00:00:47
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known as the paleo diet. It's caused a little bit of controversy in the world of anthropology and so I thought what a great idea to examine for this week's episode.
00:01:03
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Another reason why I was excited to talk about the paleo diet is because it's something that I experimented with myself. So I can give you some first-hand knowledge about what it is, what it is all about, what it does, how effective it was, and how you do it. And then I can also, as a researcher, talk about the science behind it, the science that may
00:01:32
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contradicted the People who practice it and the people who say no paleo diet you are wrong and You shouldn't have this name because you're the worst and you can take your little Crossfit friends and you can just get lost and you can have fun eating your meat and your paleo stuff and wearing your little toe sneakers and
00:02:01
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whatever else you do. So I don't know if that's what people actually say. I made that up. I might be completely just creating an entire group of people with ideologies that don't actually exist. That's a that is a possibility. I could be doing that. But I'm just gonna pretend that they're real for now. And yeah, we're gonna start off with a little bit of paleo chat. Um,
Origins and Motivation Behind Paleo Diet
00:02:30
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Now, the Paleo diet, even though they don't like to call it a diet, if you're actually in Paleo world, they like to call it a lifestyle. So, the diet slash lifestyle is most often called Paleo.
00:02:48
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And it was actually based first on a concept called the caveman diet. It was a book called the caveman diet that sort of sparked this whole movement. And so it very quickly gathered this association with paleolithic man or the caveman, which is a term that we don't actually use in anthropology like ever, but it's out there, right?
00:03:16
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And so it quickly became associated with this type of nutritional blueprint for life. And this is the inspiration for the dietary guidelines of the paleo diet.
00:03:32
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And I thought it was very interesting. I was looking into a couple of different sort of ways to improve my health not so far back. Just live better and eat better because, I don't know, living in this crazy modern world, I just kind of started to feel like I was getting bogged down by all of the
00:03:55
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Crap out there and eating fast food and sugar all day and and nothing but bread and Pastas and just stuff that made you feel really full and kind of gross at the same time That just stuff. I mean, I love it Don't get me wrong, but I was starting to really feel like crap because I ate too much of it and
00:04:19
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And you kind of know in your head that that's why you feel like crap. You don't want to admit it, but you know it's true, right? So I started looking into diets that would maybe change a little bit of that aspect of my life, give me a little bit of a different perspective on how to eat and how to eat well. And that's where I came across the Paleo diet and some other like-minded diets like the Whole30 and there's a whole bunch of stuff out there that's in the similar vein.
00:04:48
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And so I experimented with it. I went on the paleo diet myself at the time I was also thinking, oh hey, this will make a great little experiment and I can do a podcast on it and it'll be awesome.
Personal Paleo Diet Trial and Controversies
00:05:01
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And so I did it for maybe like, what was it, like three months or so before I started cheating on it a bit and sort of relaxed a little bit on my paleo standards.
00:05:14
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But in general, I have to say that I did enjoy it and I did benefit from it. And I'll tell you a little bit more about my experience later and why it was positive for me
00:05:29
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being an archaeologist and knowing the controversy and the issues that people in my field generally have with the diet going into it. So I was also excited because it made me, you know, have to really research it and understand the diet in order to do it. And then where the paleo people are coming from, not the paleolithic people, but the diet people are coming from. And then also where the scientific world and
00:05:59
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anthropology, archaeology, these people are coming from. So yeah, that's why we're talking about it today and that's going to be our main focus. Totally exciting, right? Totally exciting! Yeah, I don't have much else planned for this because I think I want to talk for quite a while so we're just gonna
00:06:22
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get ramped up and start going now some of you may have noticed side note
00:06:30
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that my last month's episode was on the archaeology of alcohol, mainly the archaeology of beer, and I was very excited to talk about beer because I like it a lot, and I drank one during the show, and this week I'm talking about the paleo diet, and guess what is not a part of the paleo diet? You got it! Ding ding ding! Beer!
00:06:55
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Or alcohol of any kind! Uh, no. Especially not beer because it's made from grains. And that's a big ol' no-no. So, um, if you may have guessed from the last episode, I am not 100% paleo right now because I do drink beer and alcohol in general and I enjoy them. So it's just kind of a funny juxtaposition of these two episodes back to back. But whatever! Whatever.
00:07:24
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I'm doing it anyway. You can't stop me. So now that that's out of the way, let's talk a little bit about paleo life.
Critiques and Misconceptions of Paleo Diet
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So hey, this paleo diet slash lifestyle can often be scorned by members of the anthropological community. It's true. And this is, in my opinion, more than likely based on the belief
00:07:50
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that the premise of the paleo diet is to eat what Paleolithic peoples ate exactly, which anyone, anthropologist or not, can tell you is impossible. Because modern agricultural systems have altered even the raw materials of the food that modern Western peoples eat today so drastically that they don't even resemble the ancestral versions of what was available to the actual Paleolithic hunter-gatherer.
00:08:20
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Also, worldwide trade and the ability to preserve foods for long-term storage have led to the invention of chemical additives and processing methods that render much of our modern food completely alien to what was available naturally to our Paleolithic ancestors.
00:08:39
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So there's this disconnect and it's that even though we can study the diet and lifestyle of modern and ancient hunter-gatherers for inspiration as to what modern humans were genetically engineered to thrive on over the last 200,000 years of our evolution, it seems pretty unrealistic to try to recreate this diet within the modern Western world. Also,
00:09:06
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No matter how close we could get to the ideal human diet, how would it complement the differences in lifestyle and the physiological changes that we've undergone as a species in the last 10,000 years since the agricultural revolution?
00:09:23
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So let's examine these main issues and the main problems put forward by those who question the merit of the paleo diet lifestyle thingy. So first off, when I've heard people criticize the diet most, one of the most common remarks that I hear is that the paleo diet, like I said, can't actually recreate the diets of paleolithic peoples.
00:09:52
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But having spent a great deal of time when I was starting the diet and researching it and reading about the paleo lifestyle by its founders and practitioners, because I wanted to learn how to do it right from their perspective, by reading and doing my research based on what they say and then having some spent time actually eating by the paleo nutritional code myself, I'm kind of convinced that this argument
00:10:22
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doesn't hold a lot of weight because those who criticize this aspect of the diet often haven't even learned enough about what the paleo diet claims to be and what they advocate as dietary guidelines. They assume that it's telling us one thing when I think in actuality it's not actually saying that it's telling us something different. So let's clear it up by going to the main source on the paleo diet, the founder of the movement, Dr. Lauren Cordain.
00:10:51
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And Dr. Cordain is a professor emeritus at the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University. He has a PhD in health from the University of Utah, a master's in physical education, and a bachelor's in health sciences. And he has over 20 years of studying and teaching on the evolutionary basis of diet and disease. And he's an expert on the nutritional characteristics of hunter-gatherer and paleolithic nutrition.
00:11:19
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He is the founder of The Paleo Diet and you can visit his website at thepaleodiet.com. Let's hear a little bit from his website about exactly what The Paleo Diet is and what it recommends for its practitioners.
00:11:39
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So this is a direct quote from the website,
Principles of the Paleo Diet
00:11:42
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the paleo diet is based upon everyday modern foods that mimic the food groups of our pre agricultural hunter-gatherer ancestors.
00:11:52
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So right here you can see that the paleo diet is not claiming to be the diet of our ancestors, but to use modern foods to mimic it, at least the food groups that were common to our ancestors as best as we can. And so there's that. It's not saying you are going to eat the diet of paleolithic peoples, because I'm pretty sure Dr. Corday knows that that is impossible.
00:12:20
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We have modern food. Modern food is different than it was in the ancient world. And what we've done to food to make it edible and to grow it, genetically modify it, and all of these things have made it different. So you cannot eat a paleo diet. That is impossible.
00:12:39
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Well, I mean, today hunter-gatherers eat basically a paleo diet, but if you live in the modern world and you go to the grocery store, you're not going to be able to actually eat the paleo diet, okay? Let's just get that out of the way. And so, you're going to do the best you can in the modern world to take modern foods and mimic the type of food groups and the type of nutritional intake of paleolithic peoples. That's what
00:13:08
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he claims the paleo diet is. And on his website, he outlines the seven main principles that make up the nutritional recommendations of the diet. The first one is a higher protein intake. So hunter-gatherer diets had, he claims a much higher protein intake, although I have heard other biomolecular scientists claim that the ancient diet did not have as much protein as we thought.
00:13:37
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But either way, he claims that they did.
00:13:40
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And so it says, hunter-gatherer diets had a much higher protein intake. Modern diets are closer to 15% of our total daily intake when they should be at least a quarter of our daily modern diet. So people aren't eating enough protein, they should eat a little bit more protein. Okay, next. Lower carb intake and a lower glycemic index are recommended. So this says that fruit and vegetables should make up 35 to 45% of the paleo diet.
00:14:10
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We are eating today too much carbohydrates and too few fruits and vegetables and this has resulted in chronically high glycemic levels in the modern diet and he claims you can fix this by lowering your carbohydrate intake and increasing your fruit and vegetable intake.
00:14:28
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Next, high fiber intake is recommended. High fiber fruits and vegetables often have more fiber than whole and refined grains because of the processing methods used on them. So despite how much carbs the average westerner consumes, they're still often low in fiber, which is a problem that can be fixed by eating more fruits and vegetables.
00:14:54
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Next, he recommends a moderate to high intake of good fats, such as monounsaturated and omega-3 fats. And to explain this, he says the modern belief that all fats will make you fat isn't exactly accurate. And this isn't a direct quote, this is my notes on what he has written.
00:15:14
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So, something related to the effect of, the modern belief that all fats will make you fat isn't exactly accurate. Many Westerners intake too many bad fats and too few good fats to begin with. Also, when you intake lots of grains and carbs, your body begins by breaking down the glycogen in them for energy. But after a certain point, they begin to store them and other fats you intake, leading to a buildup of fat on your body.
00:15:40
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On the paleo diet, because you are not eating or using grains and carbs for energy, your body will instead use the fats you eat for energy, keeping the amount of fat storage in your body very low. Because good fats are much easier to break down and use to energy than bad fats, you will also use less energy to metabolize them. So this is why Dr. Cordain recommends a moderate to high intake of good fats.
00:16:09
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Next, he says higher potassium to sodium ratio is recommended. Okay, so to explain this, natural foods generally have a much higher potassium level than a sodium level. And this ratio is beneficial to our heart, kidneys, and other organs. When we have low potassium to high sodium, as is common in the standard American diet, we see higher blood pressure, more heart disease, and more stroke.
00:16:37
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These common Western afflictions are much less common in cultures still eating traditional diets where they have higher intakes of potassium relative to sodium. So there's another one for you. Eat more natural foods and eat less carbs and you will have better everything. Next, he recommends a balance of dietary alkalines and acids.
00:17:05
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And he explains this by saying something to the effect of excessive dietary acids which come from grains, dairy, meat, fish, legumes, and salt that are not balanced by alkalines which are found in fruits and vegetables can promote muscle and bone loss, asthma, high blood pressure, and kidney infections.
00:17:27
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The standard American diet is extremely heavy in acids compared to our ancestral diet. Our bodies function best with a balanced ratio because it is not working harder to overcome the deficiencies or excess of either component of our system. So the foods we intake that metabolize as acidic, such as meat, legumes, dairy, grains, salt,
00:17:52
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need to be balanced by alkaline such as fruit and vegetable. When your body is balanced, it will be functioning better because it's not struggling to overcome the deficiencies or excess of one or the other. So I guess that makes sense, right? And then finally, he recommends a higher intake of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and plant phytochemicals.
00:18:16
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He explains that the standard American diet is very grain heavy, and grains do not provide the vitamins C, A, or B12 that our body needs. These are gained through meat, fruit, and vegetables, which should be the majority of our diet, but often represent a much smaller percentage than grains and carbs. So again, cut the grains and carbs, up the fruits and veggies,
00:18:41
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and the meat, and you will have much more vitamin, nutrients, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and minerals that your body needs and uses to function. So the general guidelines as far as food intake from Dr. Cordain are to eat more lean grass-fed meats, fish and seafood, eggs, fruit and vegetables,
00:19:08
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nuts and seeds, and healthful oils such as olive, walnut, flaxseed, macadamia, avocado, and coconut oil. These are your basic food groups on the paleo diet, so get used to them because you eat only them pretty much ever.
00:19:27
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But actually, it's quite a lot of food, which is what I was worried about when I started. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm not gonna be able to eat anything. Wrong! You can eat so many things! I sounded like Jerry Seinfeld right there. You can eat so many things! There are a lot of different combinations that can come out of those groups of foods, let me tell you.
Guest Appearance and Practical Advice
00:19:52
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All right, I'm here with Jordan Harbinger from the Art of Charm, and he's going to tell us what the Art of Charm podcasts are all about. Go ahead, Jordan. Hey, sure. So thanks for the opportunity. Basically, what we do at AOC, this is the show that we wish we had 10 years ago, and I'm 34 now. So there's a lot of folks that are 20s and 30s, and we look at how we live our lives and the way that we do things. And it's always that if I had known, if I had only known.
00:20:19
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What I'm doing with The Art of Charm and what we're doing as a team here is we bring together the best minds in pretty much every industry to teach people how to crush it in life with their relationships, at work, et cetera. So it's like having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you their expertise and packing all their research and testing and tough lessons, School of Hard Knocks or otherwise, into a curriculum. And we're very practical, which is great for your sort of scientific audience as well.
00:20:46
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Yeah, absolutely. This is great for networking, for just learning some personal skills that you can use on the job, and for finding jobs in your relationships with people.
00:20:56
Speaker
Yeah, so we talk about things like body language, the way you sit, stand, walk and talk, networking, how to follow up with the network, how to be authentic when you're creating relationships for work, because a lot of people think networking is like, here's my business card, give me a call when you want to buy a used car. And it's like, no, it's about giving, it's about relationships. But since people don't have a game plan, they kind of ignore it. And especially in your field, they're probably thinking, oh, I really hope my work stands up for itself someday and I get that promotion. And it's like,
00:21:24
Speaker
Well, it's all about who you know. And you can either say, oh, it's all about who you know, and I hate that. Or you can be like, thank goodness it's all about who you know, because I'm never going to be the top of this industry until it's too late for me to care, right? Right, right. All right, so go check out the Art of Charm podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. And you can find them also on www.theartofcharm.com.
00:21:53
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Now here's the foods that you should not be eating according to Dr. Cordain. He's gonna be a Nazi about cereal grains, about legumes including peanuts, no peanut butter, about dairy, refined sugar, potatoes, processed foods of course, salt and refined vegetable oils. These are all no-nos and you cannot ever have them again.
00:22:21
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Okay, well maybe not ever, ever. He actually recommends the 85-15 rule for eating paleo-non-paleo foods, which allows for around three non-paleo meals per week and occasional items which were unknown to paleo people such as alcohol, wine. Yes, thank god! I did get to sneak a little bit of wine in there on my paleo diet. So these are the general guidelines from the man himself.
00:22:50
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And so these claims by the founder of the diet for what it proposes to be and how it claims the modern person can best recreate the nutritional blueprints of the paleo diet include basically cutting down carbs and grains, upping your intake of fruits and veggies and proteins from lean naturally fed meats. Now that's pretty much it. I mean, it's kind of simple.
00:23:18
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And if you want research on the scientific aspect of why this specific diet is beneficial to the human body based on genetics, based on our ancestry and our evolutionary history, he has many, many, many research links on his website.
00:23:43
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that allow you to browse through peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and research on the Paleolithic diet and the implementation of paleo-like diets on modern subjects. I looked through a bunch of these. They were very interesting. I found titles like Metabolic and Physiologic Improvements from Consuming a Paleolithic Hunter-Gatherer Type Diet.
00:24:05
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Another one was marked improvement in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in diabetic Australian aborigines after temporary reversion to traditional lifestyle by Karen O'Day, which was a study that I had actually heard about
00:24:21
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which was really cool where recently westernized Aboriginal people who were suffering from ailments like obesity and diabetes actually returned their hunter-gatherer lives in the outback and during a short period, reverting to their old lifestyle, they reversed most of the damage done to their bodies through eating a pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer diet. So that was quite interesting.
00:24:45
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Another one, an article that Dr. Cordain actually co-wrote, is cardiovascular disease resulting from a diet and lifestyle at odds with our Paleolithic genome, how to become a 21st century hunter-gatherer.
00:25:00
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So you can see Dr. Cordain has not only just turned his research onto evolutionary science and nutrition into suggestions for people who want to diet, he's actually turned it into scientific research published as part of the scientific community.
00:25:21
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I enjoyed this one quote from the article that I just mentioned that was in the Mayo Clinic's journal called Proceedings that Dr. Crittane co-wrote. He says, accumulating evidence suggests that this mismatch between our modern diet and lifestyle and our paleolithic genome is playing a substantial role in the ongoing epidemics of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. My God, I can't say this word.
00:25:50
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atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Historical and anthropological studies show hunter-gatherers generally to be healthy, fit, and largely free of the degenerative cardiovascular diseases common in modern societies.
00:26:07
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So yeah, he sounds like a pretty smart guy, and I'm not using his website or the fact that he's a scientist and has written these things as part of the scientific community to say he must be absolutely right about everything he's saying, but it does lend a little bit of more credence in my mind to some of his arguments, knowing that he's coming from a scientific background and that he's actually published on the subject.
00:26:38
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So yeah, I didn't read all of the articles, that would have taken forever. There were a lot of them, but you can go to thepaleodiet.com if you want to read some of them yourself and see the type of things that I'm talking about here.
Modern Diets vs. Traditional Diets
00:26:51
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So now, let's think about whether or not claims that this lifestyle can actually benefit modern humans who have been adapting to the post agricultural and industrial world for thousands of years.
00:27:04
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Yeah, the problem is when you hear people claiming that we've had 10,000 years to adjust to our diets since the agricultural revolution. So our bodies don't have as much of a problem processing modern foods as the paleo practitioners claim. People do say that and it might be a legitimate argument.
00:27:26
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But I would say remember that though we've been eating dairy and cereal grains since the agricultural revolution, the standard American diet has changed about 180 degrees in the last hundred years or so since the Industrial Revolution and the birth of processed and mass-produced foods.
00:27:46
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Before the 20th century, don't forget, basically all foods eaten by human beings throughout our history, including our hominin ancestors, were made using local, fresh ingredients grown and processed without chemicals or preservation methods beyond things like salting and smoking, which are still very natural.
00:28:05
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So all of the foods we've ever eaten until basically the last hundred years or so were real whole foods which maintained almost all of their nutritional components through the preparation process. So they didn't lose most of their nutrition by being processed. And then also meat proteins that we were eating were also taken from animals who were in their own traditional environment and eating their natural diets.
00:28:34
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So our genome may be evolved to thrive on diets mainly comprised of protein, tubers, fruits and veggies, nuts and seeds, because that's what we evolved eating for the most part for the last 200,000 years.
00:28:51
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We've done a decent job in the last 10,000 years at adapting to diets including whole grains and dairy and legumes because that's what we started producing at the agricultural revolution when we started farming.
00:29:05
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The main problem though that exists with our physiological ability to metabolize modern food is the recent addition in the last hundred years of chemical preservatives and the deficiencies that processing methods have created by stripping many of the nutritional components our bodies are used to out of the foods we consume. So it's not so much that
00:29:29
Speaker
We haven't had enough time to adapt to this diet of grains and dairy. We have done some adapting to grains and dairy. We're doing an okay job at metabolizing them. Not great. There's still problems. We're not there yet, but we've had 10,000 years or so, and we have been eating some grains in the wild. Before that, I know you don't generally assume, but I think there is definitely evidence to prove that Paleolithic peoples did have some form of raw grain.
00:30:00
Speaker
Um, the problem is not that, for the most part. It's the last hundred years when we started adding all of this crap to our food. This is what our bodies cannot adapt to eating for the most part. I'm not going to say we have no problems with cereal or dairy. We do, but for the most part, it's all of the extra crap
00:30:21
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and the processing that we started doing to our food that removes all of the nutritional benefits that we used to get from it. So now, our bodies don't know what to do anymore. We're not getting almost anything that we used to get that we need to metabolize for energy to survive, are we? Are we? Sorry, I just got really mad. Okay, I'm gonna try and calm down for a minute. And then we're gonna move on.
00:30:48
Speaker
Okay, so besides what I just mentioned about processing and chemicals in the last hundred years and genetically modified foods, another problem that humans have metabolizing food today in our modern diet is the proportion of foods we consume today are way out of whack to what we evolved eating.
00:31:07
Speaker
Not only do we eat too much for the amount of energy we generally expel during the day, especially if you have a desk job or if you do nothing but sit on your couch all day, we eat far more salts, carbs, and sugars than nutrient-rich fruits, veggies, proteins, and healthy fats. And I'm not just saying most people, or some people,
00:31:30
Speaker
I think a lot of Western people eat way more salts, carbs, and sugars than we do fruits, veggies, and proteins and healthy fats. And if you try and argue with me on that, I will take you down because I'm right.
00:31:46
Speaker
So anyway, there's these imbalances. This imbalance of eating those foods and not having enough of the good nutrient-rich foods we need burdens our digestive and circulatory systems. Sometimes it burdens them to the point where our cells and organs experience problems functioning and then high glycemic levels result in insulin resistance.
00:32:08
Speaker
and then fat builds up, eventually our major systems will begin to fail. And this is why we have a staggering amount of obesity-related health problems in this country. Not to mention, we are just beginning to understand how the absorption of foreign chemicals and genetically engineered foods and meat are affecting cellular function in our bodies and the mutation of DNA that results in things like, oh, I don't know, cancer.
00:32:38
Speaker
And that may be part of why we believe we're experiencing higher cancer rates than we used to in the past as well. So these are just some of the other problems with the standard American diet, no matter what you think of the paleo, whatever, the problems that our bodies are having functioning and metabolizing the way that we eat today.
00:33:01
Speaker
So I thought a good way to look at this physiological process of change would be to actually look at how the genetic predispositions of people actually on paleolithic type hunter-gatherer diets are affected as far as functionality goes when they transition to a western diet because believe it or not there are still
00:33:22
Speaker
modern hunter-gatherers and people living traditional lifestyles out in the world who do not go to Whole Foods to buy their groceries, who gather them from the wild, who hunt, who practice horticulture, which is a very sort of more simple form of farming, who do not eat genetically modified foods,
00:33:40
Speaker
And we can actually look at them, and we can also look at the effects that transitioning from that lifestyle to a more modern lifestyle has had on them, because there have been many of these cultures over the last couple hundred years, thanks to imperialism, transitioning into the modern Western world, or at least the modern Western diet.
00:34:03
Speaker
So, we can actually look at this. It's very interesting. These people, hunter-gatherers and traditional peoples, are living on whole foods. They're eating a closer proportion to what Paleolithic peoples ate. And they're also utilizing more ancient methods of procuring nutrients
00:34:20
Speaker
from places that we don't often utilize in the modern world, like the extraction of marrow from bone, boiling of bone broths, and the consumption of often unused parts of the animal like organs and blood. And as you probably guessed, these peoples are generally plagued with much fewer of the chronic conditions seen in modernized cultures.
00:34:43
Speaker
So obviously they didn't come out on the best side of imperialism for the most part. As you can see in some of the horrible changes and systemic breakdowns that have happened to some of these wonderful traditional cultures,
00:35:04
Speaker
as seen in America, Australia, South American, Central America, and some of these places in Africa, obviously, where traditional life has been interrupted by the Western world, and a lot of people have been forced to adapt to this new way of life. And that isn't just cultural, that's physiological as well. So what happens when these traditional cultures experience the effects of the agricultural and industrial revolution on their diets in fast forward?
00:35:34
Speaker
Well, the physiological effects of a rapid transition from a non-Western diet of non-industrialized people to the modern Western diet are rapid and almost entirely negative. Big surprise. So according to the World Health Organization, cultures that shift to a Western diet experience a rapid increase in obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Diabetes, you guessed it.
00:36:02
Speaker
I actually remember writing a paper in my evolutionary biology class about the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and Pitcairn Island, which is home to the famous mutiny on the bounty descendants who have recently adopted Western diets. And of course, they are suffering heavily for it.
00:36:22
Speaker
I actually found some research by the World Health Organization on their predicament. I'm referring here to an article by Jane Perry for the World Health Organization titled, Pacific Islanders Pay Heavy Price for Abandoning Traditional Diet.
00:36:38
Speaker
So in the article, she explains that Pacific Islanders in regions like Melanesia and Polynesia are some of the most recent traditional peoples to shift to an almost entirely imported Western diet. And now they have some of the highest obesity rates in the world. A staggering 90% of women in American Samoa are clinically obese. 90%
00:37:06
Speaker
Yeah, you heard it right. They also suffer from micronutrient deficiencies that result in chronic conditions like anemia. Now of the 9.7 million person population of the Pacific islands, around 40% of them, 40% have been diagnosed with a non-communicable disease such as hypertension, heart disease, or diabetes.
00:37:32
Speaker
And these conditions account for 3 fourths of all death on the island. That is 75% of all deaths are due to these conditions. And that makes up between 40 and 60% of their healthcare expenditures. So to say that the problems caused by health-related
00:37:57
Speaker
conditions related to obesity are serious in the Pacific Islands is a terrible understatement. They are very serious.
00:38:09
Speaker
From my own experience, I can actually tell you that these problems are not unique to Pacific Islanders. My study on Aboriginal anthropology in Australia uncovered the same pattern since many of their Aboriginal tribes have recently transitioned from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to more Western lifestyles. The effects there have been very similar. They're struggling with obesity and many obesity-related health conditions.
00:38:35
Speaker
The article I told you about earlier by Karen O'Day documents exactly that. This type of pattern makes it really clear that these former traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle groups, they're closest to our genetically optimal diet at that point in time.
00:38:54
Speaker
When they switch to a standard American diet, they cannot adapt to this diet. They have immediate consequences to their health from that transition. So I would say most of these transitions for the people I just mentioned happened within the last three centuries. That has not been, and some of them have happened more in the last century. That is not enough time for them to adapt to the standard American diet, obviously.
00:39:21
Speaker
And the serious medical fallout from their body's attempt to process these foreign foods and function on these different nutrition ratios has just resulted in a catastrophic amount of disease and degeneration for them, which is extremely sad.
00:39:40
Speaker
So there's a very depressing look at what happens to these genetically optimal human beings who are living this optimal hunter-gatherer diet when they start eating grains, dairy, and modern processed foods.
00:40:15
Speaker
Did aliens build Stonehenge? Did the Easter Island statues walk? Did Vikings colonize Midwest America? What does mainstream archaeology have to say about all this? Listen to the Archaeology Fantasies podcast and learn about popular archaeological mysteries, hoax or fact. Learn to tell the difference with Dr. Ken Fetter and co-host Sarah of the Archaei Fantasies blog.
00:40:33
Speaker
Check out the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio and at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash Archie Fantasies. Now let's get back to the show. And it's not just problems like heart disease and diabetes that plague people who live a Western diet.
00:40:59
Speaker
Dr. Credane is actually written extensively on the link between the modern diet's high glycemic index and medical problems that are related to the high glycemic index, such as even something like acne, which affects around 90% of Western civilization. So that's almost everyone has acne at some point in their life in the Western world if you're living a Western lifestyle.
00:41:23
Speaker
And, shockingly, but not really, almost no people from traditional cultures suffer from acne. Now, I don't know if you want to call it diet, but Dr. Cordain is definitely calling it diet on that one. And that's another one of those conditions that you do see in people as soon as they transition to a Western lifestyle.
00:41:44
Speaker
So research like this is why you will hear so many so-called experts on the paleo diet. This is the type of thing that they use to demonstrate why the Western diet is bad for us and why by returning to a whole foods diet that mimics our ancestors, you can streamline your body's functionality, decrease inflammation and the effects of chronic disease on your body.
00:42:06
Speaker
In fact, chronic diseases actually tends to be a trend. If you know the backstory of a lot of people who are on the paleo diet and many of the paleo experts themselves, Rob Wolf is a well-known name in the paleo world. And after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, he used his background in biochemistry and went to train with Dr. Cordain in evolutionary health to develop his work on nutrition, sports, and the paleo diet. And he claims to have cured his disease through a whole foods paleo diet.
00:42:36
Speaker
and he has gone on to write bestselling books. He has interviewed hundreds of specialists on his podcast about paleo-nutrition. Another paleo-nutrition, primal-nutrition expert is Nora Gadeus. Oh my god, I am so sorry, lady. Nora G.
00:43:01
Speaker
She is another paleo primal expert and she suffered from chronic physical and psychological conditions until she adopted the lifestyle. Now she's considered one of the world's leading experts on evolutionary nutrition and the connection of nutrition to the mind. Another paleo expert is Chris Kessler. He specializes in integrative medicine and ancestral health and his own chronic illness led him to research and publish on the benefits of paleo nutrition.
00:43:29
Speaker
I could go on about these guys, but I'll just keep it quick. Other important names in the paleo slash primal slash evolutionary nutrition world include Mark Sisson, Richard Nicolay, Jamie Scott, John Durant, and Melissa N. Dulles-Hartwig. And amongst these and other paleo experts are many individuals with science, health, and medicine backgrounds. Some who come from the practice, from like an athletic standpoint, and then some who have
00:43:56
Speaker
no real scientific background but have converted from other careers and considered themselves independent researchers on the subject. So there's kind of a wide array of opinions and backgrounds here claiming to understand the biological and anthropological aspects of ancestral diets and nutrition.
00:44:12
Speaker
and the influence of modern nutrition and biology. And they use many of the same arguments, they advocate many of the same things, but I do have to say there are some different schools of thought on some specifics of the lifestyle, which is why there are various incarnations of it, like the primal blueprint, the whole nine. There's a couple different ways that people have brought this concept into practice.
00:44:37
Speaker
but they pretty much all guarantee on one thing. No matter what you think about the link to actual ancestral peoples and our evolutionary history, adopting a whole foods diet that minimizes grains, dairy, sugar, and processed foods will result in the overall improvement of your health and wellbeing.
00:44:54
Speaker
And regardless of whether or not their premise or the link to ancestral evolutionary nutrition is accurate, from what I've seen and read from practically everyone who has legitimately tried the diet, their claims are pretty accurate. And personally I have to add, while eating paleo myself with these guidelines,
00:45:14
Speaker
and taking more good fats and fruits and veggies than normal and slightly increasing my meat protein intake and cutting grains and dairy from my diet. Personally, in the two to three months I was on it, hardcore, I lost weight and I felt great.
00:45:33
Speaker
I'll just say that, I mean, I don't want to come out as being extremely partial toward the paleo diet because I'm trying to remain a little bit more objective about it, but I just will say from my own personal experience that I do think this aspect of what they are claiming about the diet is accurate.
00:45:53
Speaker
that there are certain elements of the modern diet that are unhealthy, that our bodies are not very well adapted to processing, and by cutting those things out of our diet and increasing more nutrient-rich foods, you will be healthier. That's kind of an un- just a- that's just kind of a thing. That's just how it is. That's life. That's a fact. Deal with it. Stop eating Arby's every day and make a salad.
00:46:22
Speaker
So there's my impartial moment for you as far as my personal feelings, but I will also go back to get into a little bit of the back and forth between the anthropological community and the science community with the paleo world as well. Just so you know, I'm not completely impartial.
00:46:44
Speaker
So what if anything are paleo practitioners getting wrong when they say our bodies weren't meant to function on the food pyramid of today? Especially with its emphasis on grains and dairy and our growing obsession with sugar and processed foods.
00:46:58
Speaker
As far as that statement goes, as I just said, nothing. I don't think they're wrong about that. But I do think that their reasoning is a little bit off. I think a lot of the problems that we're having today come down more to the changes in our food over the last hundred years or so, not the 10,000 that came before it. Do our bodies function as well on grains and dairy? No, I don't think so.
00:47:24
Speaker
It's clear to see physiologically that there are still many people in today's world who have difficulty digesting grains and dairy, because I don't think we've evolved to the point yet where the enzymes and cellular functions necessary to incorporate them and their nutrients into our metabolic system with ease are universal. We don't all have that yet. According to specialists like biological anthropologist,
00:47:50
Speaker
Biological anthropologists, Leslie Aiello, seen in the documentary The Perfect Human Diet, there are visible deficiencies in the growth patterns seen in our ancestors in the last 10,000 years due to the loss of diversity in their diets and the impact of replacing proteins and phytonutrients with carbohydrates.
00:48:10
Speaker
So during this period, the last 10,000 years, we did begin to get smaller. Our cranial capacity actually shrank. And she states that seeing these changes in our body, it's like a reversal of our physiological development for the previous 200,000 years.
00:48:30
Speaker
We thrive on a diverse diet that is heavy in omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in natural fats and proteins because of the result of environmental pressures that selected those who functioned the best on these forms of energy. Without them, we wouldn't be the people we are today because these were the building blocks that helped our brains grow and increase in cognitive capacity.
00:48:55
Speaker
These types of foods helped us evolve, and according to research by physical anthropologist Gary Sawyer of the Museum of Natural History, diets heavy with cereals and grains have since helped us devolve, unfortunately.
Diverse Interpretations of Paleolithic Diets
00:49:10
Speaker
So, despite what I think is some very compelling evidence against the standard American diet,
00:49:16
Speaker
as far as our optimal genetically adapted diet goes, there still are some legitimate issues with how some aspects of the paleo diet are presented. So let's get into them kind of quick. If you're interested in hearing more about this and the backlash against the paleo diet, I would go to YouTube and
00:49:39
Speaker
Find a TED talks by a woman named Christina Warner. She's an archaeological scientist who specializes in the Paleolithic diet.
00:49:47
Speaker
And she has a TED Talks called Debunking the Paleo Diet. And so a lot of what I will go into now sort of comes out of her argument as to why the paleo diet is misleading or inaccurate. And even though I thought her talk was very interesting, I will explain also in the end that I did think she was also a little bit off base in certain points that I will point out too.
00:50:12
Speaker
So, okay, what again? What are some of the legitimate issues with the paleo diet? Okay, so as any anthropologist in the crowd will point out, the paleo diet is a good diet, but it really isn't a paleo diet. In fact, claiming that there was only one paleo diet is rather misleading to begin with.
00:50:33
Speaker
Paleolithic peoples lived all over the world and had extremely varied patterns of food procurement and consumption that were greatly influenced by environment and season. So Arctic peoples ate an extremely different diet from plains cultures.
00:50:49
Speaker
from the food themselves to the ratio of food groups to the nutrients based on what was available to them and their methods of preparation. So that's one thing. There isn't just one paleo diet. And if we tried to eat the paleo diet of the Arctic paleo peoples, we wouldn't do so well.
00:51:08
Speaker
Right? Each diet is adapted to its own environment to be the most functional for the people in that environment at any given point in time. And so when we say, Oh, I'm going to be on the paleo diet, we're mostly talking about this one specific sort of
00:51:25
Speaker
plain like savannah ish type of type of diet. We're not talking about any type of extreme living here. So we've kind of in the paleo diet, they've kind of made this mismatch concept of what the paleo diet was, when in reality, it's much more complicated than that.
00:51:44
Speaker
Right? So Miss Warner also claims that humans did eat meat in the Paleolithic but not in large quantities and also in different forms from today. She says we aren't as adapted as carnivores as
00:51:59
Speaker
you might think. She claims that the paleo diet thinks you should be eating tons of meat protein and that Paleolithic peoples really didn't eat that much. They were scavengers. They probably ate some meat protein for sure, but they didn't live heavily on it.
00:52:17
Speaker
And now I think obviously some of that is true and you can see that in the bone chemistry of nutrients we're taking in from meats and proteins versus vegetables and fruits and grains and those type of things. But to say that we aren't adapted to a carnivorous diet is a little bit
00:52:36
Speaker
misleading. We're adapted as omnivores, so we do have adaptions to help us metabolize to eat meat and to digest meat. So that's a little bit off. But she also points out that the type of meat we were eating is very different from what you go buy at the grocery store.
00:52:56
Speaker
Paleo people and hunter-gatherers eat a lot of very lean small game. They eat bone marrow organ meat and today that's not really the type of steaks that you go out and buy, right? Which is true, although I don't think she realized that in the paleo diet they do recommend eating organ meat
00:53:13
Speaker
and they do recommend getting very lean cuts of meat. If you are eating it, that is only grass-fed and organic. And to do things like boil your bones for broth and to extract marrow and things like that. I don't know if it's that widely practiced, but it is something at least that they recommend. So there is that, that's pretty similar.
00:53:37
Speaker
And she also points out that, like I said, there is some evidence that there were some wild grains eaten by paleo peoples. They may have been grinding them a bit earlier than we thought. They wouldn't have been farming them on a large scale or turning them into bread or anything like that. But to say that paleolithic peoples never ate any type of grain whatsoever is not entirely accurate.
00:54:05
Speaker
And that probably is true, but that still doesn't mean that we were eating grains to the level where we had this serious adaptation to efficiently process grains in our system. I still don't think that that has happened yet, really, to this day. And then, of course, she goes in to point out that modern fruits and vegetables are genetically modified. They aren't.
00:54:31
Speaker
Anything close to the wild versions that that paleolithic peoples ate and as I told you earlier, that's totally true But obviously the paleo diet knows that you unless you're a hunter-gatherer today You will not be able to access those foods. So you go to their grocery store and you do the best you can with the modern foods that you have and then
00:54:53
Speaker
She points out that paleo diets are a little bit less diverse than you have in a grocery store, obviously, but they were diverse for the environment that they were in and they were seasonal. In paleo diet world, they do tell you to try and eat seasonally and to include a wide array of food in your diet.
00:55:17
Speaker
The point is that everything she brings up, she does have a point, but the paleo diet kind of agrees with her, which is the weird thing.
00:55:29
Speaker
So, even though she has some legitimate points, and there actually are some real issues with how the paleo diet is presented to the world, as far as it not really representing the reality of paleolithic life, in the end, she advocates eating a diet high in unprocessed whole foods, meat, fruit and vegetables,
00:55:51
Speaker
and restricting your grain and dairy intake. So at the end, she actually tells you to eat the damn paleo diet. So she doesn't really debunk much. I've kind of come to the conclusion that her entire problem with the diet, and I think most people's problem with the diet, is literally just the name. If they called it something different from paleo diet, people would be like, oh yeah, that makes total sense. That's a great idea.
00:56:21
Speaker
But this is where we are. It's already out there in the ether and so I just think it's kind of funny that people go back and forth about this because
00:56:33
Speaker
The diet is based on, it's inspired by paleolithic life. It's not claiming to be paleolithic life. And people who freak out because they think it is are a little bit overreacting and I think that they maybe haven't done as much research as they should have about what the diet actually claims to be. So, wow, I just talked for a really long time about that.
00:57:00
Speaker
I feel a little bit soapboxy, like maybe you're going to come away from this thinking, wow, she was really pro paleo and she was a little bit maybe not fair to the other arguments against it. And I don't want you to think that I haven't considered all of the other things. When I researched and when I was getting into it, I tried to be very critical.
00:57:25
Speaker
and there definitely are parts of it that I don't think are terribly accurate. I think they pay way too much attention in the paleo world to the bad influences of cereals and dairy when I think they should be focusing much more
00:57:40
Speaker
on the effects of the last hundred years of chemical processing and additives that have really changed the genetic quality of the food we're eating and the nutrients we're intaking and the effects that that is having on our body because I think that has a much bigger impact on health in the world today than whether or not we're eating whole grains.
00:58:02
Speaker
and whole natural dairy products. In fact, there are some people in the primal or whole foods world who say you really should be eating whole natural grass-fed dairy and eating whole grains. And you know what? When I came off of the paleo diet, I still
00:58:25
Speaker
eat kind of informed by it, but I have started eating whole grains and full fat dairy and I think it's been fine for me. So I would recommend if you're interested in trying it out, if you want to see whether taking any of these things out of your diet will help improve your health, maybe give it a try for a month. The good thing about it is that if you remove these food groups and you have a reaction where
00:58:54
Speaker
maybe some type of medical condition you have clears up, then you can figure out what is causing it by gently reintroducing these food groups back into your diet and seeing how they affect you. If you stop eating dairy for a month and the migraines you've been having for a year clear up and then you start eating dairy again and you have another migraine, you know what's causing your migraines, don't you? So I think there are certain aspects of at least experimenting
00:59:22
Speaker
with this lifestyle that can be beneficial to people. And so while still trying to be impartial as in academic and pointing out the flaws with it, especially with the concept of the paleo life, which modern people really aren't living lifestyle wise or diet wise, and probably is not really in our capacity, I still do appreciate the effort to live healthy lives and to mimic
Benefits and Personal Beliefs
00:59:50
Speaker
the same type of food nutrient ratio intake that our paleo ancestors had because the result of adaptations from our environment led us to function best on those types of foods. And that is what I feel is beneficial about the paleo diet and where people who are fans of the diet and experts who push it are doing a pretty good job in getting people to think about. And so that's where I'll leave you on paleo life.
01:00:20
Speaker
My paleo life was pretty good, but you know what? I am not a very unhealthy person to begin with, so even though I felt great on the paleo, I really loved drinking wine again and I really loved having a piece of toast in the morning and my pasta every now and then and a big old glass of milk.
01:00:42
Speaker
Um, I think for me, that's what's going to work out best and you guys can choose what will work out for you. But, um, don't balk at the paleo diet because of what you've heard from people who have backlashed against it without doing their own research. That is what I would advise you to do your own and, uh, decide for yourself.
01:01:02
Speaker
And if you want to do some research into the scientific side of this, that's a great idea too. There are lots of articles and sources on the internet that you can go to to help research the biological, anthropological, archaeology, all of these aspects that will help you understand better how our genome evolved in the Paleolithic era based on certain nutritional characteristics.
01:01:32
Speaker
And I think that's a good thing to go check out because it's very interesting, huh? I think so.
Listener Engagement and Feedback
01:01:41
Speaker
So that's it for today's episode on paleo life, Jenny style. I just thought this would be an interesting topic. And if you feel like debating it, then please send me an email at guide to getting dirty.com. Tell me what you think or comment on my Facebook page, my Twitter at struggling arc, or my blogs, Jennifer McNiven.com or the struggling archeologist dot tumbler.com.
01:02:08
Speaker
I would love to hear from you all and I value your opinion very much. So get in contact and we can chat and be besties forever.
01:02:22
Speaker
Okay, well, I have talked entirely too much and I am going to go and relax and eat something delicious, possibly paleo and possibly naughty non-paleo. So I will catch you guys the next time. My name is Jenny. This is the Struggling Archaeologist's Guide to Getting Dirty. Thank you for listening and I will talk to you again soon, friends. Bye-bye!
01:02:51
Speaker
A friend of mine told me that it really annoys her when paleo diet people advertise their like, homemade paleo muffins or paleo pancakes because, I mean obviously paleolithic people didn't have muffins, so it's pretty unrealistic, right? You know what? I totally get it. But I think the paleolithic people deserved muffins. I mean, wasn't life hard enough? Really? Let's give them the muffins, people. That's all I'm gonna say.
01:03:20
Speaker
I said it. Okay, it's out. Paleo people deserve muffins too. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com