Live Blogging from the Paleo Summit X: Day 6 - Chek, Hartwigs, Siebecker

Link:  Paul Chek
Title:  Paleo - Instinct Before Intellect

Ratings:

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Mini-Review:

OK, so I awoke early today and so decided to get a jump on today's offerings while still dozing a bit.  Very early on Paul goes off into my idea of woo woo with the whole talking to trees thing or how junk DNA is the stuff of our instincts and all that.  He kind of lost me there and never got me back.  Which is unfortunate because he had some excellent points to make about behavior that is taught and/or part of a civilized construct vs. what we instinctively do.  He compounds this by discussing education as designed to babysit kids and squelch creativity.  While some parts of his history may be true, I'm not sure where slave children's 

education on the plantations so that their slave parents could be most productive factors in.  While I'm not a huge student of history, and I realize Roots isn't a completely accurate accounting, I must have missed that part where the slave children were indoctrinated in schools to keep them out of the way.  

It goes a bit further down hill before rebounding some with lots of poop talk.  Paul recants how he knows someone at work who poops once a month, several who poop once a week and how it's common for folks to poop only every three-or-so days.  Ummm ...  I don't think it's even humanly possible not to poop for a month let alone a week if one is eating normally, and I've lived with lots of humans in my life and don't recall a single one ever pooping every third day or so on any sort of regular basis.  A month?  That BS meter goes off there.  And what reason does Chek give for this?  Not enough Bran Cheks?  Nope.  Folks are just too busy to poop so they train themselves to refrain from doing so.  Really??   I'm sympathetic to "holding it in" as I'd rather poop at home, but I gotta go, I'm gonna go!

After all of that, Paul does make a lot of common sense.  Stop reading diet books.  He also discusses productive self-experimentation.  If you change up 10 things at once for a couple of days, what do you hope to learn.  While his 4 day cycle is too short for most things in my opinion, it's a start.  And he encourages re-challenging to make sure it was really that after all.   I did fade at the end of this.  It's quite long.  But I don't regret listening.

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Link:  Dallas & Melissa Hartwig
Title:  Paleo for Vegetarians

Ratings:

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Mini-Review:

This is more of a presentation aimed at vegetarians on how to become a meat-eating paleo, rather than how to be a vegetarian paleo.  Having never been a veggie myself -- or anything close -- there wasn't much here for me.  But if you are a veggie and want tips on how to transition to meat eater ... this is the presentation for you!   They do pay passing homage to the whole foods approach of "some" veggies -- apparently in stark contrast to the Twinkies & HoHo vegetarians.  This I find a bit much because I've never known one of those, but I guess there really are a whole lot of veggies that just don't eat meat but eat a bunch of junk crap.  Their overarching message seems to be that vegetarians are missing out on so many nutrient dense foods.  They go into how those who object to animal eating from an ethical/humanitarian POV might approach eating animals.  I find the attitude on factory farmed animals a bit snobbish as I just don't see that even all current vegetarians and paleos might be supported by non-factory farmed foods.  I always get squeamish when Peter Singer is discussed as an ethicist, but they do mention that mollusks and such may be your gateway "flesh" as Singer assures us these are not sentient beings.  Their strategy is other wise to start with the ruminants since these live the best lives overall and go grass fed.  They put big plugs in for sustainabletable.org, so I'll pass that recommendation along here.   

As I said from the get go -- if you're a veggie on the verge or trying to go paleo, this is THE presentation from the Summit for you.  If you're already a happy carnivore or omnivore, there's not much here for you.  I can do without the better-than-thou attitude on the source of my own carnivory.

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Link:  Dr. Allison Siebecker
Title:  Paleo Digestive Troubleshooting

Ratings:

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Mini-Review:

I think this is probably a "don't miss" for you if you suffer any digestive issues.  Allison covers the various causes of digestive upset distinguishing between bacterial causes in the small intestine vs. the large intestine.  She covers various dietary strategies for dealing with these issues such as low carb, specific carb, "slow carb" and GAPS.  Also covered are the often overlooked problems of constipation and fat intolerance when switching to a low carb diet.  I found it a bit boring , probably because I don't have skin in this game, but I am comfortable recommending this to those who do.  It is chock full of info,  quite a bit new to me, and although I cannot guarantee it's 100% accurate, nothing sent up any red flags on bad science.   I really liked how from the get-go, she says "Don't Guess, Test!" and lists:

• Breath tests for SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), lactose/fructose intolerance,  H.pylori
• Endoscopy for GERD, reflux, celiac
• Heidelberg test for how much stomach acid is made with a meal*
• Gastric emptying study to evaluate this

Of those with IBS, up to 84% have SIBO so that seems like a pretty good thing to get a handle on.  I would note (the *) that she mentions that Heidelberg test is not well known.  Ahem Ms. Nora Gedgaudas ... from whence did you pull that factoid that 90% of the population has low stomach acid from??