Paleo 101: How and why you should eat like a Caveman

Lithose_sl said:

I'm not a doctor, so I know jack all about HFCS. I just know I let myself have 3 cokes a week (I'm addicted, and I won't cut them out completely) and I can taste the difference between sugar (Mexican/Pass Over) coke and HFCS coke (My wife's tried to switch it up on me, too. I've always caught it heh, so I'm pretty sure it's not in my head, but what the fuck do I know.)...So that's why I tend to go for products with sugar, rather than HFCS.

However, I was under the impression that the actual process of breaking down sucrose in your body, and not the end result of the chemicals, made HFCS and Sucrose different. In other words, yes, they are essentially the same chemicals when digestion is complete, but sucrose takes longer to process, so it's not as quick to be converted to fat (Because it can be used as made for energy?). I think this study concluded that the rate at which HFCS is converted to fat is greater.Here---again though, my understanding is based off of people interpreting the data, so this data could be bullshit, I have no idea (Hence why I linked it, to get other people to read).

In the end though, aside from curiosity, I personally don't give a fuck. I just know my average life span is higher, and we feed more people today, so I see no reason to try and revert to a diet where cavemen had to pick seeds out of their shit to survive. Things change (Like our diets from cavemen to modern men) and change isn't always bad. Personally, everyone in my family has lived well over 85, unless they got cancer, and they all ate a "Mediterranean diet". Which is lots of vegetables, fruits, with some grains (Rice or pasta), fish and the occasional chicken/red meat (Rarely), and almost all olive oil for flavoring and lots of spices/peppers. Seeing as it's worked for my great grandparents and grandparents and I feel better with it, I'm going with it.

But I'm still curious about the process of converting sugar vs HFCS. If the study is just bullshit, or if it has some merit.

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I have no idea if that study is any good. But you should look up the constituents of table sugar as compared to HFCS and then apply what you found to that study.

Dashel_sl said:

You havent posted anything long or short that is more than vague assertion. It's just a sort of generalized rant. You claim that there "Plenty of research and expert opinion to show that it's absolutely among the worst of the fad diets to follow". If you want to claim that then show me why it's the worst and who your plenty of experts are and what their research said. Just some links or short quotes. I dont need a semantics war on studies, p values and all this evasive bullshit. If you have a point, make it clearly and concisely for consideration. If you think saturated fats will kill people there are plenty of resources to cite to back up that claim. And I would note that the man who developed this diet, Loren Cordain "still maintains that saturated fat never formed a significant portion of the Paleolithic diet". So seems like you both agree.


Ironically, after all this bluster about how adept you are at parsing medical studies you led off by saying you wouldnt comment further.

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You're exactly correct about my approach. You posted an article in which you only read the conclusion, and you don't know what to make of it. You don't have the first bit of understanding of what kind of study it was, what the study actually looked at, or what the study actually found. You obviously didn't read it because you would have seen the exact three paragraphs in which the authors discussed the very things that I brought up. And in their discussion, the authors cited the papers that discussed the replacement of saturated fats with unsaturated fats leading to a stepwise decline in CVD. So yeah, I'm not going to do your homework. If you're actually interested in this topic, you should consider actuallyreadingthe study thatyouposted to defend your dietary choices. I promise you it's not a simple thing of "saturated fat is perfectly fine!" and it's obviously not "all saturated fats are bad for you!" (they're not!) But purposefully consuming large amounts of saturated fats (beef, butter, coconut oil, etc) is an extraordinarily unhealthy choice, and advocating that lifestyle is, in my opinion, borderline criminal.

It's not a big deal that you blew it with that study. Most people, if they haven't had graduate level biostatistic, scientific training, or gotten their egos beat down in a journal club, can't reliably interpret scientific papers anyway. A layperson simply reading the conclusion is about as useless as a massive dick on Manti Te'o. By the way, an easy way to find the full text of most articles is to search Google for "titlename pdf". It seems most journals release the full text for free after a year or so. It can be a pain getting the latest studies sometimes. If it's not in JAMA or NEJM, then I don't have access to the latest full text of studies.

I personally truly enjoy reading between the lines in the discussion section of most studies. The infamous study from San Antonio which tried to show that artificial sweeteners actually cause weight gain (they don't) was written by a psychopath who believed that Aspartame was responsible for all sorts of ridiculous things, including seizures, syncope, and everything in-between (I have an email from her.) In her paper, she begrudgingly admits that most likely people who gain weight that consume artificial sweeteners are most likely overcompensating for their perceived caloric savings, and were already on unhealthy trajectories. (For example, a big fat person drives through McDonalds, "double-sizes" his hamburger and fries, and then gets a diet coke, thinking that he's "saving calories", but ignoring the rest of his 2,000 calorie lunch. Or the person who says "well, I had a diet coke, now I can eat a bowl full of ice cream.")

Dashel_sl said:

At this point I'm not sure if you're trolling or what.

If you read my post bringing up the study I specifically phrased it as a question. Meaning there is some evidence that saturated fat is not causal in relation to cardiovascular health. You then admit not all saturated fats are bad. Move on to suggest someone is promoting "purposefully consuming large amounts of saturated fats (beef, butter, coconut oil, etc)" which is simply untrue. I have been eating this way for 2 full weeks now, rather strictly, and I do not consume anywhere near large amounts of any of those three.

Beef is a subset of "meat, fish, fowl and eggs". Butter and coconut oil are not suggested in large amounts but mostly for cooking or flavor. Further, they suggest fats like nuts, seeds, olive oil and avocado. They do suggest that butter and coconut oil is better than what we see many people eating today: highly processed vegetable oils such as canola oil.

Canola has all the supposed "heart healthy" markers of high MUFA/PUFA and low SFA but many people view the extreme processing it undergoes as a disqualifier.

All of this brings me to a final point here, that dietary patterns and individual foods are what should be looked at rather than chemicals and macronutrients.

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Get fucked, saying I'm trolling. You're going around posting studies which you can't even begin to interpret. You're a know-nothing pimping a retarded lifestyle choice. Before this post I've tried to be somewhat civil and somewhat challenge you to do some indepdent learning about all this crap you are spewing. In the very study you linked, you could have actually read it and learned so much, and learned why what you just wrote in this quoted paragraph is retarded.

No, instead, like all Paleo retards (the only thing prehistoric is your understanding of science), you ignore all contradictory evidence and focus on opinion pieces and goofy books.

PS I love the canola oil strawman.

I love that you ultimately call me an idiot for pointing out that you're quoting literature you don't understand. The more you reveal that you're clueless the more insulting you become. Dunning-Kruger at its finest.