More Livin La Vida Low Clue: Make sure to get your ...

... locally farm-grown and raised coconut oil!  This was too long to tweet, but Jimmy Moore is at it again stirring up contention in the Paleo community.  

We’d certainly be a lot better off in our weight and health as a society with less need for pharmaceutical medications and chronic disease management if everybody just started consuming foods they recognize as being grown, raised and harvested by local farmers in their communities. Of course, it wouldn’t happen overnight as sustainable farmer Nick Wallace shared in my recent podcast interview with him. But getting a good percentage of people to choose real foods like grass-fed beef, pastured eggs, coconut oil, green leafy vegetables and more would certainly be a great step in the right direction of where we need to go nutritionally-speaking in the years to come to prevent a total healthcare meltdown from happening. I see this as a common mode of thinking that permeates through both the low-carb and Paleo communities.

I can certainly get locally grown and raised grass-fed beef, pastured eggs (WTF is up with that term?  It just sounds off to me, but anyway ...) and green leafy veggies, but there are no coconut trees anywhere!

Tropical oils got a bad rap when they started to be used in processed baked goods instead of butter because ... drumroll please ... they were cheaper ... and as a bonus had a longer shelf-life.  But most of this was palm oil which is decidedly different than coconut oil (or palm kernel oil which is rather alike CO in FA profile).  With global CO production being only 2% of oils, and US use of soybean oil, it is simply highly unlikely that CO use was considerably greater historically in the US.  Note that palm and palm kernel oils make up the largest fraction of the global edible oil market at 27%, exceeding soybean at 23%.  I searched (granted not exhaustive, but time/priorities and all that limit) for historical stats, and was unable to find anything on US use of CO, or tropical oil consumption stats in general other than this (biased in veggie PUFA favor) which pegs total tropical oil (palm, palm kernel and CO) at 4% of total fat intake in the early to mid-90's.  

So ... while I realize coconut oil is the great unifying elixir in paleo and low carb communities, this fixation on eating this anything-but-whole-food as a veritable staple in some diets is utterly ridiculous.  The whole notion of added fats really isn't paleo, and people can argue till the grass-fed cows come home how it is easier to extract oil from coconuts than a soybean or a corn kernel, it doesn't change the fact that our ancestors ate the whole coconut where available.  They didn't break it down to flour and oil and milk and cream and butter to make various recipes and cook their meat in, etc.  

BTW -- Is cluelessness in social constructs and human dynamics paleo or something?  From an outsider's POV, I never really saw a lot of contention in the community, other than, perhaps, competitive jockeying for brand recognition.  I don't know what went on behind the scenes at AHS11, but I was shocked to see Tom Naughton, Gary Taubes, and to a lesser extent Michael Eades and Andreas Eenfeldt on the speakers' list.  In Andreas' case he was replacing Jimmy Moore, and realize this was before Jimmy had "converted" to paleo.   Eades basically co-opted Taubes' Shai schtick, Naughton gave a version of his Scientists Suck schtick, and I will admit I didn't bother with the other two.  I don't know Pottenger's biases, but my interactions with Aaron Blaisdell on PaleoHacks would indicate he's firmly in the LC camp.    I certainly can't blame them when trying to get AHS up and running for courting some low carb star power, but with this inclusion were sown the seeds of discontent.  Taubes to this day doesn't speak to O3:O6, which, whatever your opinion, remains a cornerstone of the movement.  He also persists in misrepresenting traditional diets, most infamously that of the Arizona Pima in furthering his TWICHOO.  Eades is even easier to dismiss, because despite his somewhat paleo roots, the man published a decidedly un-paleo low carb work of pseudoscience fiction in the fall of 2009.  This diet included shakes, DAG oil, d-ribose and allowed (nay, encouraged) all manner of artificial sweeteners.  One can argue that the meat weeks on this plan or his former Protein Power plan were more paleo all they want, someone true to an ancestrally-based lifestyle first and foremost never publishes the crapola that was the 6 Week Cure.  Naughton at the time was all about science and bromantical defenses (offenses?) of Eades' metabolic advantage wing of the LC cadre.  Paleo??  Ancestral??  Admittedly he seems to have gone a bit more that route of late, but certainly not something anyone would have associated with Fat Head when he was selected to speak at AHS11.

But worst of all, the mere notion to consider to invite Jimmy Moore to speak was an act of utter organizational incompetence.  Sure, out of necessity, Jimmy had been dragged figuratively kicking and screaming to adopt a  crazy extreme diet of nothing but grass-fed beef, pastured eggs and coconut oil in January of 2011.  But prior to that, Jimmy's LLVLC webpire -- including his podcasts -- was built upon and supported by all manner of LC junk foods.  Surely the organizers of AHS were aware of this?   It's not like any of this was a secret -- he blogged daily of the crap he ate.  Indeed he didn't even make it very long into that latest experiment before dark chocolate -- 6oz in one day sometimes, which doesn't sound like all that much until you go look at a Cadbury bar or a bag of Lindor truffles -- made its way into the mix.  Likely not naturally sweetened, but since the manufacturer apparently didn't sign on to sponsor his consumption, we'll never know.

In an act of attempted "professional" suicide I'll never really understand, Jimmy began trashing former LC food sponsor after former LC food sponsor with his n=1 jokesperiments, beginning in May 2011, after he fell off the paleoish bandwagon without explanation.  He suspended these on the advice of his "internationally renowned" doctor -- because eating a piece of real toast and having a totally normal glucose response to it was evidence that he dare not challenge his deranged metabolism -- but this was long after his invite to speak at AHS11.  No doubt his speech would have been about how low fat made him fat ... which would have been ancestrally related exactly how?

In any case, though they can't be blamed for the LC v. paleo rift, the organizers of AHS11 are responsible for setting the stage.  And a stage they provided ... for the Insanie they helped Gary Taubes earn ... but more importantly a dialogue that needed to be opened.    But other than Gary Taubes -- who sought to keep TWICHOO alive -- and folks like Eenfeldt who are still trying to grow and capitalize off of careers in LC -- there remains only one person who saw challenge/debate/antagonism/controversy at every turn.  Jimmy Moore.  Really.

The problem boils down to this:  For all the free-thinking, well-educated, anti-establishment fervor in the community, nothing *offends* the sensibility of a dedicated low carber more than voicing one's differences with TWICHOO.  And try as they may, TWICHOO is NOT, I repeat, NOT, an evolutionarily supported hypothesis by ANY stretch of even Taubes' own vivid imagination.  It was Jimmy Moore who stirred up false controversy and contention with his safe-starches data dump.  He, and he alone, was responsible for the ensuing fall-out ... including the nonsensical un-debate over the concept at AHS12.

Meanwhile, the paleo community has mostly only ever really known an obese Jimmy Moore.  Nevermind that, at 230 lbs with a 42" waist, he was never sensationally skinny as his first book's subtitle trumpets.  Most everyone in the paleo world -- heck, most in today's LC world even -- never met a Jimmy weighing under 275 lbs, with a lipid profile even Atkins would cringe at, and apparently nagging health issues both mentioned (low testosterone), imagined (hyperinsulinemia) and unmentioned (hemorrhoids).   Still ... he had that popular podcast and all that exposure -- for the good of the movement! -- so what harm can be done by inviting him into the fold?  Paleo gets marketed to a whole new niche, after all.

Of course it doesn't hurt that some people in this community seem rather more willing to believe that someone like myself would make a crank call to Carnival about Jack Kruse and a potential bioterror attack than that getting a 3/4 million dollar book advance just might have influenced some of the content of GCBC and fueled Taubes' incalcitrance in correcting obvious scientific errors in same.  It's easier for Jimmy Moore -- who to this day has his ridiculous Haters tee pic as his avatar on social media -- to point fingers of distraction than to own up to the reality that any animosity at this point is of his own doing.  I suppose it's better than the skinny-necked caricature mix between Beavis and Frankenstein, but ....

Now folks are using a "cutesy phrase" about being agnostic on macros/carbs.  This frustrates Jimmy Moore about the supposed myopia of the community he continues to try to capitalize off of despite the facts that:

• Paleo (LC-lacto or whatever) was a huge fail for Jimmy (he gained roughly 20 lbs on paleo between AHS11 and PaleoFX)
• His current diet is neither paleo nor whole foods based

I would add a point I usually don't mention, but I see mentioned more frequently these days:  Jimmy doesn't even believe in evolution.  I find it difficult to stomach promoting a diet that IS based on this notion that the human genome has not evolved since paleolithic times to handle/thrive on the neolithic-and-beyond food.  I'm sorry, but to attach that label in any way, shape or form to oneself is disingenuous if that isn't at least a basis for one's beliefs.  Otherwise it's just a label -- trending popular on Google -- to capitalize on.

I suppose it never occurred to Jimmy that the reason why ...

There’s a relatively new phrase that I’ve seen popping up more and more frequently by a few people online as a means of combating those of us who show support for carbohydrate-restriction for optimizing our weight and health

... is because these people want nothing to do with "combating" Jimmy Moore and would rather he just go back to where he came from.  Or perhaps he knows, which I suspect he does, and the only way he can see his relevance in paleo moving forward is to continue to stoke the phony flames of controversy over carbohydrates in the paleo community.  The paleo-rati has chosen to disengage.  Smartly.  But this may not be enough -- as the lessons of Jack Kruse should have taught folks by now.  Jimmy will have none of that, he will keep stirring the pot of false controversy and feigned victimhood.  Paleo peeps would do themselves a favor to just distance themselves, unequivocally,  from this flaming hypocrit!