This might be the bullshittiest answer anybody not a politician has ever given.
Should be easy for you to disprove then smart guy.
Remember, around 50% of you will get the metabolic syndrome, despite thinking you have it all figured out. Why? Cause you are wrong.
you’re stuck on an outdated notion of paleo, which has ‘evolved’ to be more in line with our evolution. namely, a much higher concentration of natural plant and animal fats to go along with the lower recommended carb intake. plant and animal fats are your best friend, eat them as long as you feel hungry (provided you keep your carb intake around your ketogenic threshold). bing bang boom, boundless energy and optimal gene expression.
read up on the primal diet, which takes paleo and aligns it with our evolution.
Matt has never heard of the process of extracting fats from grains. It’s been a pretty big deal for the last 100 years dude.
News flash Matt – there’s no such thing as “vegetable oil”, it’s grain oil, and it is the largest part of the American diet by calories. Not “1g grain fat a day” Matt, it is roughly 20% of daily calories, while sugar is “only” 16%. Which makes the American diet around 35% grain oil and grain syrup (by calories).
If in 1905 someone had checked my formula they would have said “hmm, PA’s formula predicts homo sapiens will not be adapted to these grain oils”.
pizza
What’s the deal with this pizza slice thing? that’s like walking into a chippy and getting 1 chip
so… fried and processed foods are the problem, as i’ve said, repetitively. and why i’ve continually stated that whole grains are the only form worth ingesting, which only have 1% fat content.
grains are controversial right now
this is such a 1990s statement. “only 1% fat”!!! Well then it MUST be good for me.
No, it’s hard to disprove, because you haven’t really said anything that can be proven or disproven. You’ve just said “delta vs what we think people have eaten during times when we don’t really know what they’ve eaten.”
Once again, the reason you can’t be comprehended is that you aren’t actually saying anything that can be defined or proven. It’s fine to have hypotheses, but then you need to claim these are hypotheses, and not simply say “I have an idea, and I’m clearly right.”
You may be right, but you can’t even communicate what you’re right about. You just say “delta” and if you don’t like it, you say “delta must be big, I’m right”, and if you do like it, you say “delta must be small, I’m right.” But since you have not actually given us a way to figure out how to measure delta, there’s really no way to establish whether you are FOS or not.
It would actually be a more interesting (and perhaps accurate) process to say “Let’s see what foods work best for our bodies today in terms of energy and longevity (or perhaps fitness up to the age of 35-40, and hypothesize that these are what our prehistoric ancestors were eating.” That would be an interesting study as a way to guess what we were eating 20k years ago. You would still have to find a way to filter out any kind of evolution that happened in the 500-1000 generations that evolvied in the interim, but it would be interesting to try to triangulate our food sources that way. Most primates are omivores, and the exact proportions of a diet are hard to figure out even from prehistoric trash sites because stuff decays at different rates: Bones remain, meanwhile vegetable matter gets washed down river or something.
In this argument, one thing that stands out his how TF and MLA - though they seem to be on opposite sides of the debate - actually bring up hypotheses that can be tested and they produce to reference real evidence that supports their points, plus a description of the reason for present biological processes to react positively or negatively to specific nutrients. These are things that - while I don’t have the studies in front of me nor have time to look them up and read them before posting - are actually things that can be tested and observed, rather than comparing them to an imagined past that we cobble together from archeological breadcrumbs of Piltdown Man and his buddies that are constantly changing.
PA by contrast just says “if it fits what I imagine our ancestors 20,000 years ago being like, it’s gotta be good for us, see, I’m right again! And if you disagree, you must be one of those Americans with comprehension problems.”
There are indeed comprehension problems, but PA’s apparent problems with other people comprehending what he’s saying are primarily about not communicating anything that can be pinned down. GreenMan’s comment is spot-on… it’s the sort of thing we expect from politicians (“I voted for the Iraq war before I voted against it.”).
so do we charge bchad with murdering PA, or let it slide? I’m willing to look the other way.
My big problem with PA’s statements are not so miuch their content, but that that PA’s statements are non-falsifiable. You might think that’s a good thing, as if non-falsifiable means it must be true.
But it’s not, because non-falsifiability means there is no way to determine whether it’s true or not: we cannot obeserve the process of evolution directly, the breadcrumbs are to few and far between to make inferences that have anything other than enormous margins of error, and we cannot design an experiment to mimic and test it.
FT’s and MLA’s arguments aren’t that way. To the extent that PA’s have to be true, it’s only because they are in their own tautological reality. Thus all this “see, I am right stuff” is like the guy who says “I’ve spent 1000s of hours reading these books that you haven’t seen, and so what I say *must* be right.”
If I bought into that line of argumentation, I’d be going to church every Sunday.
We DO know what people ate in prior periods (paleolithic, neolithic and industrial foods). Paleolithic = meat, plants. Neolithic = grains, dairy. Industrial = processing prior four groups. Delta HAS been defined (chemistry). Examples of delta: plants eaten today are similar (though not exact) to plants eaten 200K years ago, while partially hydrogenated oils from grains are less similar. Butter, though a new food, is chemically similar the fats in red meat. Some quantitative using chemistry, but some qualitative using basic sense, because we do not have a time machine (BChad: “but but but we don’t have a time machine so nothing can ever be known!”). All foods CAN be tested on humans, and HAVE been tested, and the results ARE available. The more chemically similar a modern food to foods we have been eating for the longest time, the better we can expect humans to do on those foods. Evolutionary biology, duh.
- Animal fat, including butter – increases HDL, does not increase TG and BS
- Grain oil – we have 100yrs of testing on the American population, unlike animal fat it decreases HDL, increases LDL!
- Grain syrup – increases TG, increases BS
- White flour – increases TG and BS
- Veggies – carb, yet no increase in TG and BS!
The observations go on and on. High delta foods move 5 of the 5 metabolic syndrome metrics in the wrong direction (and increase risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s and some cancers), low delta foods do the opposite. There is a reason why this is the case, see my theory. See Stanford’s A to Z study, one of the largest best studies ever on the various American diets (Atkins, SAD, Vegan, etc), exactly in line with what my theory predicts. See the USDA food supply report, as the food supply changed over 100yrs (increasing industrial foods, decreasing neolithic, decreasing paleolithic) metabolic syndrome metrics increased, in line with what my theory predicts.
Exactly, I have done this, and it becomes circular. The foods that DO NOT increase the metabolic syndrome markers, happen to be the foods we know we have been eating for the longest time (meat and veggies), thus more proof they are the foods we have been eating for the longest time. Wrong metrics. Life span is not a metric of health, Americans have long unhealthy lives (see MetS diseases), Upper Paleolithic had shorter healthy lives (says archaeology). Energy is not a metric of health, Americans eat a bunch of corn syrup and hit the gym, they have energy, then they get MetS. And the larger the quantity of high delta foods they eat early on, the earlier the diabetes, etc (even if they appear very healthy on the outside, see modern bodybuilders chugging corn syrup vs golden age bodybuilders eating paleo). Every post from you is – “we don’t have instantaneous travel, so we can’t goto the center of the galaxy and take a photo, so we can’t know a black hole exists there, so we can’t know anything and can’t move forward”. And yet there probably is a black hole there, and we can move forward with other theories that assume there is, when these theories turn out to be true, we have yet more reason to believe there is a black hole there. Hello Mr Science??? Understanding how I arrived at the correct answer is not realistic, and irrelevant. The theory exists, it is well defined, it fits all observations, either disprove or present better theory.
Yes, PA is FOS.
you continue to argue that grains are bad but you are only saying that grain fats and “grain syrup” (whatever the hell that is) is bad, despite grain fats and sugars being a very minute part of the whole grain. you are not commenting on the parts of grains that are healthful and make up the vast majority of what a grain is. that’s like me saying, animal meat is bad because people just eat the skin and animal skin is bad for you. you are the opposite of a logician. i am the definition of a logician.
^Charlie Munger brought the exact point when defending his coke habit. He asked how the habit could be judged when the outsider has no idea what positives it brings to his life. He believes it gives him short bursts of clarity the allows him to do his job better. His broader point is you have to consider the positives and negatives when judging anything. If you don’t, it’s just rhetoric.
This post is better, because you now have cited some things that can be tested.
Incidentally, my problem is not that you don’t have a time machine and can’t ever be 100% sure. It’s true that you can’t be 100% sure, but my problem is that the error bars on what we can induce from evidence are miles wide. The things we think we know about paleolithic times change dramatically from decade to decade. It was only a short time ago that we learned that Piltdown man didn’t even exist - he was an invented fraud.
I understand that we hypothesize with the data we have, but my problem is that you present 20k year old diets as if they are known with certainty and can therefore explain everything that’s wrong with our diets today, when in fact they are highly disputed.
As for black holes in the middle of the galaxy. We can’t go there and be sure, but the black hole explanation fits a ton of other things we observe (like how fast stars are moving in the vicinity, which suggests that something massive is tugging on them), and there are no other explanations (that I know of) that successfully explain this, and it fits with a lot of other evidence.
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The real reason I’m beating you over the head with this is because you love to sit there and complain about reasoning and comprehension problems.
Now, you are pretty good at deductive reasoning, but what you go light on is 1) presenting evidence, and 2) considering alternative explanations that might possibly generate similar evidence. A defensible theory/explanation needs to have
- a theoretical explanation of what is going on and what you expect to observe (this part you’re reasonably good at),
- an evaluation of methodologically sound evidence to support the theory, and explanations for any evidence that seems not to fit it, and
- an analysis of alternative explanations for the same evidence and a reason why they are inadequate, therefore making yours better.
Otherwise, all you have is a hypothesis… which - if we were just shooting the $hit over a few beers would be fine - but you sit there complaining about reasoning skills, yet can’t reason yourself. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
wait wait wait, are you saying you invented or were the first to identify the primal diet and you discovered why it is optimal? funny I’ve been doing this diet for years and have never heard of you. I got my perspective on nutrition from Mark Sisson and investigating his claims, which he has been making since early 2000s, I believe. Are you his mentor?
Damn, bchad, that was good. You must just choose to play the Devil’s advocate on occasion…
Again with this “must be known with certainty” thinking. 
The broad strokes are actually NOT largely disputed by real science people, just by vegans and the media (corporate interests are biased obviously). I’ve been thru all the data, and my conclusion on what past humans diets probably were, is part of my analysis. Competing theories like “humans evolved on starch” are disproven by check-mate type things like “so where are the cavities, why do cavities become a big issue only 10K YA?” and “why then the high TG and BS today when eating this much starch”? They have no answer. And their theories are all anti-Occam’s Razor, why did they go off on a tangent when there is a better fit?
Mike Richards is the leading guy on quantitative evidence on past human diets – using bone analysis 100% of all observations from the upper paleolithic say “top level carnivore”. Not one vegan ancestor ever found. I’ve triangulated using other knowns, such as a qualitative study of 230 hunter/gatherer tribes (the largest study ever), plus around 15 quantitative studies (that’s all that exist)…the mean from all these is around 70% animal foods (hunting) and 30% plant foods (gatherering). I have the Excel spreadsheet showing the math, I am legendary at Excel/modeling.
Every single bone-analysis from the paleolithic, AND the mean from ALL H/G studies, says “mostly animal foods, partly plant foods”, it’s time to just move forward. High level, we know what they were eating.
Yes, I’ve done all this.
You assume since you don’t know about it, I have not done it. But think it thru, since presentation of my extremely thorough analysis would take 500pgs…you see. People here are not up to speed, and will not follow thru on even ONE point of data, let alone 1000 points of data.