The Carb-Sane Asylum

Screenshot of Meta-analysis lead author Eric Manheimer's article on Cordain's ThePaleoDiet commercial website. Is it that time already?  For systematic review and meta-analysis?  Apparently someone thinks so and managed to get some time at or off of work to do one on the paleo diet.  Seriously?  What even is the paleo diet?  I have asked that question many times here myself.  If a premier expert in paleolithic nutrition cannot provide an answer, then who can? I've also written on this many times.  I believe that THIS POST   is a great place to start as it contains links to the various studies and blog posts I've done on those studies.  I'll repeat some links here in a bit. These were the clinical trials (not all randomized-controlled) to date as of January 2014.   I've included the purported composition of "paleo diets" as well. Direct links to blog posts:   Frassetto , Lindeberg & J ö n...

In 1985, S. Boyd Eaton and Melvin J. Konner wrote a seminal paper, in the New England Journal of Medicine , that would "start it all" for the modern paleo diet:   Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of its Nature and Current Implications .  Also that year, they would publish, along with Konner's late wife Marjorie Shostak, The Paleolithic Prescription .  [Some links:  Links to full texts of many paleo papers are here , I discussed the book here .]   Unfortunately the PDF is not digitized so I can't quote here, so I've simply screenshot the introduction below.  If you need to enlarge to read, click on the image and do your thing with the browser!  

Several months ago, I began writing a post entitled Paleo Schneckenfeude, inspired by the concept of schadenfreude and the misfortunes brought on one faction of the paleo community by other factions, and vice versa.  I never published it up, because the "sell by" date had definitely passed before I had the time.  But I will use the title here, with the addition of the term Payleo™ to the IHC lexicon, courtesy of the latest high profile Guy to jump ship. Schadenfreude  [shädən froidə]   from the German:  schaden  (damage) and  freude  (joy).   Enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others Yes, it is fair to say that there is no love lost between me and most in the paleo wing of the IHC, and I am experiencing a tinge of guilty enjoyment in watching the coconut fed chickens coming home to roost yet again. Schneckenfeude  ... The Evolution of Schnecken?

A little detour into the Protein Power  book by Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades, 1996.  Was looking at a few things sparked by the thermodynamics posts he's made, and was surprised by a few things in the PP book that I had never even skimmed until now.  This post didn't fit the thermo topic, so I thought I'd mention this separately (and there may be another post or two coming as time permits). I had never heard of the Eades or their books until I found the low carb community in 2009.  While Atkins remains the primary low carb diet, the PP book/plan is high up on the list for second place, and Eades' blog was still uber popular at that time. Circa 2009 the low carb mantras of the day were largely focused on: Up the fat intake Fat can't make you fat You can't get fat or gain fat weight without eating carbs, so even if you don't lose more weight, at least you won't gain.

This post has been a long time in coming.  Bits and pieces have been in the draft since long before the Ancestral Health Symposium this past August even took place.  The abstracts and bios had been online for quite some time prior, so I had a pretty good idea of what was to transpire.  Indeed, I had intended to blog on this before AHS14 just to "compare notes" after all was said and done and had done quite a bit of research. For an organization and event containing the words "ancestral health", the program in general seemed lacking in relevant material.  Paleo was a less often heard term this year, yet it was sadly not replaced by discussions of more recent and/or definable ancestral diets.  You know ... those that promoted health up until, in many cases, the 20th century and beyond?   The nods to discussion of the lifestyles of ancestral cultures were clustered together on Day Two of the symposium, all of the shorter 20 minute variety, there alo...

not paleo The underlying premise of the paleo diet is that we are supposedly consuming foods that our physiologies did not evolve to consume.  In order to get our diets back into concordance with evolution, it is necessary for us to look back. Waaaaaay back.  Nevermind that most of the problems are extremely modern -- as in within the past century modern, often even a matter of a few decades modern.  No ... we must look back millenia and tens of those to the paleolithic times.  Because ... evolution. But even since I first heard of the paleo diet, and began reading about all of these remote ancestral tribes and cultures, there has been this nagging voice asking me how these populations can be translated back into the paleolithic.  Some of these tribes are decidedly neolithic despite their "primitive" cultures.  Any domestication of animals or cultivation of vegetation would be counter to the HG existence we are told we evolved through.  So in a...

True confession:  I ate beef in a stew last night and I'm in that dangerous age range for doing so according to the latest study that came out.  Finally, a study the paleo community can finally agree on about and rally around!  Paleo for the win!  If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can get a dose of sanity here . But before mass media hysteria gifted the paleo community with the great unifier -- another meat is bad study -- it was all up in arms over another media circus:   Paleo on the Dr. Oz show !! That was truly an odd spectacle.  There you had Paleoista, Nell Stephenson, who in her own practice and through her blogging is about as puritanical "paleo" as one could imagine, and Chris Kresser, someone who was at best loosely associated with paleo, but almost from the get-go seemed to be "beyond paleo".

direct image link Greetings! So with time for a little breather, I'm getting caught up on my reading. I've got three books I plan to review and it's a conundrum which to do first, they are all so bad. Seriously, it's not the style or the writing. It's the content that passes for science these days that is just so mind-numbingly abysmal. The three books are David Perlmutter's  Grain Brain , Jonathan Bailor's  The Calorie Myth  and Chris Kresser's  Your Personal Paleo Code .  I'll save Bailor's for another day, but his poor man's version of  GCBC  somewhat factors into today's post.  I'll also save the reviews of the others for a later date.  For now, let me share my little round about the internet that inspired the post title here ;-)