Fruit Restriction isn't Paleo

It's January 18th, and that means if you went with the packs, you are almost 2 weeks into your 21 Day Sugar Detox or, I believe, roughly half way through the torturous Whole30® ... or maybe you took up Amy Kubal's invite to drag the paleo yo-yo out of sleeping dog with Robb's 30 day plan (upon which Whole30 is based).

Ya know, if you don't think there's science behind paleo, just ask Robb!  He'll shoot you a Lindeberg or a Frassetto.  Let's look at that latter one for just a bit more than I did HERE.  The Frassetto paleo diet is an outlier in that all of the others ended up spontaneously reducing calories (~1400 to ~1900 cals) while this diet modestly increased calories from baseline to ~2700.   Furthermore, in Frassetto, total carb intake before and after the diet was roughly equal at around 250 grams per day.   They ramped up in three phases for 7 days and then followed the paleo diet for 10 days.  Here are the menus:

Looking at that paleo diet, it would be fair to say that at least 150 grams of the 250 grams carbs were sugars, and quite a bit were from "fast acting" liquid or concentrated sources:  carrot juice, tomato soup, honey.  Also, one can fairly safely assume that the pre-study diet contained more starch and was thus, by default, lower in sugar.  As a result the Frassetto paleo diet increased sugars from baseline.

Given as the study group was ~38 years old, ~27 BMI, and sedentary, and no significant weight loss was involved, the changes are intriguing.

Toss me a Lindeberg then?  Well, the Jonsson study with the breakdown had a diet of a combined 77 grams of mono- and disaccharides, of which 29 grams were sucrose ... in diabetics.    If participants in this study had consumed 2000 cals/day, they'd be flirting with 100 grams of sugars per day.   There's reason to believe Lindeberg shakes out similarly as it is heavy on the fruit as well.

How about Robb's sample diet (from Cordain)?  See for yourself (Table 3), 76 grams of sugars.  

But they're natural?  Not so fast!  Sugar = sugar = sugar

Where did this notion of paleo = super low sugar come from?  That modern fruits are too sweet so they, too, should be limited?   (Leaving aside the mainstream views of those like Nathaniel Dominy and evidence pointing to starch as major carb in the paleolithic).

Maybe the #solution to this #dilema ...

... is to #ditchthefakeopaleo and #eatsomestarchandsugar

My new "real paleo" book, is proving to be a goldmine.  From Staffan Lindeberg (p. 49, decluttered of references)

Fruits differ from other edible plants in that they contain appreciable amounts of fructose, a monosaccharide, which typically constitutes 20–40% of available carbohydrates in wild fruits and 10–30% in cultivated fruits. A (very) high intake of fructose contributes to obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes in rats and mice, but the effects on humans have not been fully established. Unlike rodents, pre-hominin primates likely consumed considerable quantities of fruit for 50 million years or more, from the time of early primates until the emergence of Australopithecus 4 million years ago. An enhanced ability to handle fructose may have been conserved among Australopithecus and Homo. Therefore, findings in rodents should be interpreted with caution. 

A daily fructose intake below 60 g, corresponding to 4–5 kg of pineapples, appears safe. Approximately two thirds of dietary fructose in the US population is provided by non-natural foods and additives, mainly sucrose (a disaccharide built up of fructose and glucose) and high fructose corn syrup. 

In conclusion, the concerns about dietary fructose are not strong enough to suggest that humans are not designed to eat large amounts of fruit.

Apparently Sanfilippo, the Hartwigs nor Robb Wolf know about this?