Paleolithic diet adopts primal, evolutionary health approach

By Robert O'Callahan     10/29/09 7:00pm

"If it tastes good, spit it out," was how Jack LaLanne, the so-called "godfather of fitness," put it. This maxim for healthy living has now permeated our culture as indisputable truth. Bacon, doughnuts, chocolate and butter will all kill you. Broccoli, beets and cabbage are what we should be eating instead. Setting aside any deeper reasoning for a moment, we know these to be facts, because we feel it in our gut. Because good can only come from doing things we don't enjoy.This belief makes it easy to believe being a vegetarian or jogging grueling distances every day just has to be healthy. Anyone arguing the contrary fights a brutal uphill battle. Scientists seem to change their minds weekly regarding the healthiness of eggs, but we remain dutifully skeptical of anything that tells us we can eat or do things we enjoy and still be healthy.

For those of us not in the best health, the logical response is guilt. If you are fat, you must be committing the deadly sins of sloth and gluttony. Overweight people need only sacrifice more of the things they enjoy, and starve themselves and pound the ground more to get out of their rut. Of course, none of us can live up to the lifestyle the high priests of fitness prescribe to us, but we should feel guilty nonetheless. It is mankind's lesser-known original sin - we were all born with bodies that want depraved and unwholesome things, and we must suppress these urges. When we do inevitably slip, we can always buy indulgences in the form of diet pills from the pharmaceutical industry.

This self-sacrificial mindset started in the 1950s when heart disease was gaining awareness in the United States. Ancel Keys published a study in 1953 arguing that animal fats were to blame since they clogged arteries with cholesterol. Since then, mainstream medical research has continued down this path. At present, the Food and Drug Administration's food pyramid instructs us to eat a lean diet of mostly whole grains and vegetables if we expect to not die of a heart attack at age 50.

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So where are we now, almost 60 years after Keys' initial advice? As a whole, the United States is far less healthy in almost every metric. Obesity, diabetes and heart disease are now far more prevalent than they used to be. The official story is that we are just sinning more - TV has more channels now, and food just tastes better. While we continue to strive harder to follow the pyramid's stoic guidelines, health experts tell us we just aren't trying hard enough. Much like the epicycles added to Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe to explain retrograde motion, our mainstream dieticians devise ever-more-convoluted explanations as to why their advice is making things worse.

Maybe at this point we should start considering opposing opinions. To do that, one must first lose the bias that being healthy must be painful. One of the dissenters we have all heard of is Dr. Robert Atkins. "But didn't that guy die of a heart attack from eating so much artery-clogging saturated fat?" is most people's first reaction to his name. (Nope - check www.snopes.com.)

But this urban legend is plausible because of our premise of self-sacrifice. Atkins promised and delivered a way to eat satisfying foods while still losing weight and becoming healthier. While there are major flaws in his diet, it was a step in the right direction.

Sir Francis Bacon wrote, "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Man's body is certainly no exception to this rule. What is our nature - did our ancestors evolve to graze on lean plants like our cousins, the gorillas, did? Or did we evolve into the apex predator of the African savanna? Evolutionary nutrition, currently on the fringe of medical science, seeks to answer this question. A growing "paleolithic" movement promotes the argument that near-complete carnivory has been our mode of survival for most of the last 2.5 million years, and that our bodies are ill-adapted to foods like grains that only emerged with the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Physicians like Dr. Michael R. Eades and Dr. William Davis have had success treating heart disease, obesity and diabetes by putting patients on the "paleolithic diet."

To evaluate such claims objectively, we need to respect our bodies more fundamentally. Rather than torturing ourselves by denying our cravings, we should listen to the signals our body gives us. These cravings evolved to ensure our health and survival, so our dietary science must use a broader context integrating archaeology and anthropology with medicine to find a way to fulfill these primal urges.

Robert O'Callahan is anenvironmental science andengineering graduate student.

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