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The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight And Get Healthy By Eating The Food You Were Designed To Eat (2003)

The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat (2003)

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3.72 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
0471267554 (ISBN13: 9780471267553)
Language
English
Publisher
john wiley & sons

About book The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight And Get Healthy By Eating The Food You Were Designed To Eat (2003)

This is the summary of the diet:“The Paleo Diet is based on the bedrock of Stone Age diets: Eat lots of lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables.”That seems to be the diet recommendation of every grandmother that has ever existed for the past million years.Here are the rules in more details, 1. Eat lean meats, fish, and seafood as much as you can! 2. Go to town on fruits and nonstarchy vegetables! 3. No cereals 4. No legumes 5. No dairy products 6. No processed foodsWell, it seems only 3-5 puts it at odds with the grandmas. Specially “No Dairy Products”.The idea behind the diet is eat like a caveman. The theory is that our bodies have been eating certain amount of food for millions of years and in the last 15,000 or so, we have shifted to agriculture, so our bodies are not necessarily adapted to new diet. Make senses, but obviously a bit daft also, given that going back to those millions of years means publishing a food and going on talk shows, like the old cavemen did.I think I can follow certain parts of it, but I’m not willing to put aside grains. Rice and Bread are so important to me. Meals without either of them are so unsatisfying. I’m willing to cut my shitty processed stuff as much as possible, but other restrictions are very troubling for my life. We already discussed rice and bread (and fuck brown rice, they taste like ass (not that I have eaten ass)). But how about dairy product? I’m okay with milk, but I love the Iranian Doogh. I don’t care if the cavemen didn’t eat that, they didn’t know what they were missing on! Also, legumes. Chickpeas for falafels, kidney beans for Ghormeh Sabzi, lentils for Gheymeh. Over my dead, unhealthy body.P.S. This is just note taking, “A simple visual inspection of the fat on any cut of meat lets you know if the animal was raised on pasture or on grains. Pasture-produced meat has fat that is orange to dark yellow in color, whereas grain-produced meat has fat that appears white.”

This book is a long list of statements that should all end with [citation needed]In order to distinguish his work from competing diets, Cordain spends an inordinate amount of time in the early chapters dumping on the Atkins diet, but he does so in a way that skews the research. He complains that the Atkins diet does away with fruits and vegetables, "Cancer-fighting fruits and vegetables![citation needed]" A lot of the book is like that. He goes deep into anti-salt and anti-fat, which I supposed looked good in 2003. Recent studies show that low-salt diets do nothing to prevent progression to hypertension, and low-fat diets do little to moderate or control cholesterol and atherosclerosis. My own physician pointed me to recent articles in JAMA indicting starches.But what irks me most is that the Paleo diet, like the Slow Carb diet and every other diet on the market, is that to justify it to the masses it must delve deep, deep into nutritionalism.Food is not a set of nutrients. It's not just a vehicle for the transmission of components, for Omega 3 and polyunsaturated fat and calcium chloride and so forth. Food is what we eat to sustain ourselves, it's pleasure and socializing and ritual and experimentation. Boiling food down to a Power Bar and a glass of water isn't breakfast, any more than porn is sex.But somehow, to sell the product to the masses, The Paleo Diet, just like Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Body, must describe in excrutiating detail the trade-offs at the micro level. I guess the basic message has been heard so often it no longer registers: all that sugar, simple starch, and readily digestible calories is what's making America fatter than ever, so stop eating those. Just like "exercise more" no longer registers. Hell, I can shorten the modern guidelines to one sentence: Eat food you cooked yourself.

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Two words: citation needed. Look, I came at this some months back (a borrowed copy) hoping to find something I could use even though it's way outside my "lifestyle" of choice, at odds with an ethical, humane way of consumption. But I hoped to find something, healthy diet-wise, that I could adapt, something I could use to help others. I thought there must be something to it, something interesting and unique... What I found was juvenile and lacking in evidence. I should have expected more "broscience" I suppose, like the flood on paleo blogs out there, but I thought the author's credentials were a bit better than the rest of the primal guru crowd... Oh well. I shouldn't have wasted my time. Now I know for sure that's not the place to go looking for info unless one wants a pat on the back for engaging in bad habits and naturalistic fallacies of the highest order. Disappointing. I was hoping for something. Anything. Eh... Some of it smells awfully close to Intelligent Design drivel - a little worrying. Why did I go there? Put it down to a lack of sleep! Nothing to see here, move along.If you want something similar, Tim Ferriss's Four Hour Body is around the same calibre, but far more entertaining, and - perhaps most remarkably - more scientifically sound... staggers the imagination...
—Renée

While there is merit to the general idea behind eating like our Paleolithic ancestors, many of the extreme ideas behind this book have been called into question by recent research. For example, the suggestion that a protein calorie is not equal to a carbohydrate calorie has not been verified by real-world studies. But the real failure of the book is clear in its ridiculous portrayal of a vegetarian diet: yogurt and carbs. In this "case study", the person is portrayed as weak and sick because of their avoidance of meat. Utter rubbish; there are elite athletes who thrive on a proper vegetarian diet. It's a weak argument at best. In general, the science is good. But it falls down when it resorts to shorthand -- a chloride ion is not basic (as in acids and bases) no matter how much you want to simplify the science. And a sodium ion is not acidic. Readers would be better served by using the words and concepts of acids and bases correctly.Am I convinced that a meat-heavy diet will cure diabetes and prevent cancer, as this book suggests? No. But I'm glad I read it and now can understand the hype.
—Margaret

Yes, I jumped on THAT bandwagon and read this book. Was curious about they hype since several friends and acquaintances have tried this with grand success in terms of feeling better and getting lean (but not mean). This books makes comments about "research" and "my teams" and "statistics show", but doesn't footnote it so the reader can cross-check. That's a big issue for me since I like to trust but verify things (yeah, I just pulled a Reaganism). I'm not convinced of the validity of the few studies alluded to nor am I convinced that Paleo ancestors were cavity-free and disease free. Instead, they likely died before they reached twenty-five and had little to no chance to develop heart disease because they just didn't live that long. So, no, I don't buy the whole "cavemen were healthy" hype. That said, I do think there's value in the eating methods proposed in this book. I've done a lot of research and read a lot of books on nutrition (China Study, lots of Vegan and Veggie stuff, Raw diets, blah blah) and have tried them all to see how they made me feel energy and health-wise. For me, the vegan thing resulted in super weakness and the raw thing was impractical and the vegetarian thing while making me feel good at first ended up w/ me getting my calorie load in carbs rather than veggies. So, I think the paleo concept in terms of eating is probably a very healthy way to go. I'm going to give it a shot because it seems simple - eat meat (but only LEAN meat), lots of veggies and lots of fruits and moderate wine/spirits. Grains are out and all processed foods and sugars are out, of course, which may be a problem for many folks. I think the true test is to see how it makes you, as an individual feel, and if it boosts energy and all that jazz, then it's a good fit. Either way, it's absolutely more healthful than the typical American diet high in bad fats, processed food, salt and sugar.
—K. M.

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