Older isn’t always better

The Washington Post has this really silly article about an on-again, off-again diet trend called the “Paleolithic diet.” It consists of eating “lots of lean meats, nuts, fresh fruits and vegetables; no grains, salt, sugar, legumes or dairy products.” Unsurprisingly, like most hip and fashionable diets, this is just an approximation of the tried-and-true but boring calorie-counting approach. They give the green light to fruits and veggies and lean meats, but cut out starches and added sugar — that sounds like a regular diet to me.

Of course, the “Paleolithic diet” has added appeal because it’s old. If traditional is good and ancient is better, why not go all the way to prehistoric?

[Fitness coach John] Main says at least half of his gym’s 80 or so members follow the diet pretty consistently, thanks to his convincing pitch that “this is how our human bodies have evolved to consume and process our nutrition” before the “onset of modern agriculture.” (“Modern agriculture” can sound like a disease in Paleo-speak.)

… [Colorado State professor Loren] Cordain writes that our Paleolithic ancestors were “lean, fit and free from heart disease and other ailments that plague Western countries.” Now, he adds: “Look at us. We’re a mess. We eat too much, we eat the wrong foods, and we’re fat.”

Any critical notions are constrained to one paragraph which begins, “Of course, there are skeptics.” Because you know how those skeptics are! Always being disagreeable, with their actual claims about human evolution and the human body’s ability to process various foods! As the reporter returns to Jennifer Jeremias, the star of the article, we read: “What’s important is that she’s never felt healthier.”

I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad diet. Like I said before, it sounds pretty much like normal calorie-counting with an added gimmick. However, it’s dangerous to endorse the idea that if humans did it a long time ago, it must be healthier than and generally superior to anything we do today. There are plenty of other so-called traditional or ancient health/medical practices that definitely result in harm, and even if this one is harmless, it teaches and normalizes an ideology that opens the door to danger.

What blows me away about the whole ancient=healthy idea is the fact that most of the people attracted to it have a great standard of living in the present, and they have no idea how bad things were long ago. Sure, people in the Paleolithic may have had a diet with the “proper balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats,” but they didn’t have, for example, meat thermometers to make sure they never got sick from undercooking it. Pretty sure they also didn’t have refrigerators or freezers. We also have penicillin, vaccines, a deeper understanding of anatomy and genetics — heck, we have the germ theory of disease! I could go on and on. Modern life isn’t looking so unhealthy now, is it?

And let’s not get our facts muddled up, please. I agree that it’s unlikely that many people in the Paleolithic era died of type 2 diabetes or heart disease, but I’m pretty sure that has less to do with the precise details of their diet and more to do with the fact that the average life expectancy was 33.

The bottom line: there’s nothing wrong with a diet that’s high in valuable nutrients and low in calories, but there’s no reason to involve any pseudoscientific hype.

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January 4, 2010 · Written by
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One Response to “Older isn’t always better”

  1. Emily K Identicon Icon Emily K on January 6th, 2010 11:36 pm

    What differentiates this diet a little more from the “old fashioned, normal” diet is that a “normal” diet could include any number of processed foods, so long as the calories add up to the right amount. I’m all for enjoying the benefits of technology, such as pasteurization and refrigeration, but I also like my food to be.. food. And this isn’t a millenial “green-minded” trend – Upton Sinclair noted in the 1910′s the appalling conditions (and often ingredients) used to process meat in pre-WWII America, causing Teddy Roosevelt to trash his breakfast sausages.

    Additionally, our bodies might run on caloric intake, but they’re not calorimeters. Vinegar affects blood-sugar – and by proxy, the feeling of satiety – despite the fact that it is not high-calorie. Free glutamates also affect how satisfying a food might taste. I believe there is a hypothesis proposed that artificial sweeteners might go against brain chemistry by causing the body to expect sugar to be entering the bloodstream – but when no sugar enters it, the craving for sugar (*actual* sugar) remains.

    I like my food simple and I like being able to pronounce the ingredients. I’m not necessarily opposed to MSG being used in food, but I question why the food product might need MSG in the *first* place. Is it not sufficiently delicious on its own, without chemical enhancement?

    I recently discovered at the salad bar that rather than use the bottled dressing (which I never really liked that much anyway, nor used much of) I can make my own dressing combining olive oil, red wine vinegar, rice vinegar, and a little salt, oregano, and black pepper. It tastes much better, compliments the food better, and doesn’t contain extra sugar, chemicals, or sodium. (Much of that sodium comes from preservative chemicals and not even for affecting the flavor of the food.)

    I do eat some “processed foods;” don’t get me wrong. But I also believe that you are what you eat and try to reflect that in my diet.

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