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  #151   ^
Old Mon, Jun-11-12, 20:47
aj_cohn's Avatar
aj_cohn aj_cohn is offline
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Plan: Protein Power
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Originally Posted by WagsMarie
Nothing with chemicals but diet soda, down to one can a day from one hundred.... I think I'm okay.


Dear Lord, please tell us you're exaggerating on your former soda drinking!
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  #152   ^
Old Tue, Jun-12-12, 05:00
WagsMarie's Avatar
WagsMarie WagsMarie is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aj_cohn
Dear Lord, please tell us you're exaggerating on your former soda drinking!


I am! I never used to drink it unless out at a restaurant. But when I started LC'ing (and the weather got warm) I was drinking 6-8 cans a day. I know it's insane- but I feel like it helped me along at the beginning. It was a "treat" to a person who was a compulsive over eater- and smoker- as recently as January.
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  #153   ^
Old Tue, Jun-12-12, 05:42
*Caz* *Caz* is offline
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Oh I had a diet coke habit of 4 - 6 litres a day (130 to 200 US fluid ounces).
Harder to kick than cigarettes, easier to kick than sugar!
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  #154   ^
Old Tue, Jun-12-12, 12:48
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
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Default Why eating like we did 20,000 years ago may be the way of the future

Quote:
Why eating like we did 20,000 years ago may be the way of the future

When it comes to our eating habits, it's clear that we're doing it wrong. We may be in the midst of health crisis, but there are few practical solutions for dealing with it.

But now a growing chorus of people are claiming that modern and processed foods are to blame, insisting that we should instead take an "evolutionary approach" to our diets and turn to foods that were eaten by our Paleolithic ancestors. Critics have responded by proclaiming it a misguided step in the wrong direction. Either way, Paleo eating has become a major lifestyle.
There's no question that something's terribly wrong with the way we eat. Nearly one in three Americans is overweight or obese, and rates of diabetes continues to rise. These conditions, along with steady rates of heart disease, cancer, and inflammatory problems, have led some to predict that the young generation now growing up will the first ever in our history to have shorter lifespans than their parents.

Part of the problem is that virtually everything we thought we knew about eating is wrong; the current health crisis is in no small part caused by widespread and pervasive food confusion - and much of driven and reinforced by the modern food industry. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we now know that saturated fats are good and that salt has been unfairly vilified. It's becoming apparent that whole grains are extremely unhealthy, and that sugar is far, far worse than we previously thought, a conclusion that has led some experts to essentially describe it as poison.

At the same time, grocery stores are filled with fat-free and fat-reduced products - and the obesity problem persists. Fad diets have virtually no staying power, much to the delight of those offering them. We have become a fat-starved people, who, in its place, have substituted high density carbohydrates like bread, white potatoes, rice, and other sugar infused foods.

But like so many things in life, there often comes a time for corrections, and diet is no exception. To address the situation, a growing number of people are proclaiming that modern foods are to blame, or more specifically, those foods that came about as the result of the Agricultural Revolution and, more recently, the larger food industry. The answer to many of our health problems, they suggest, is to look at our evolutionary history and see what it has to say about what our bodies were actually meant to eat.

An evolutionary approach to eating

It's been said that nothing in biology is worth knowing outside of the context of evolutionary biology. Human nutrition is no exception.

The human genome has remained relatively unchanged for the past 120,000 years - a lengthy expanse of span of time during which our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors primarily ate meat, with some vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Evolution ensured that humans were well adapted to eat those types of foods, and their bodies were happy to receive them.

It's only been in the last 10,000 years, however, that humans have started to engage in agriculture, a technological and sociological development that has resulted in increased reliance on grains, legumes, and dairy — what are now Neolithic staples. Trouble is, our bodies haven't the foggiest idea what to do with these foods, and in some cases, they're actually toxic.

Shockingly, it's been over these past 10,000 years that humans have become significantly shorter, fatter, less muscular, and more prone to disease. It's this realization that has led some thinkers like Jared Diamond to proclaim that agriculture was the worst mistake our species has ever made. While it's been great for society as a whole, from a health perspective it's proven catastrophic for individuals.

Consequently, a new approach to eating has emerged called the Paleolithic Diet, or simply "Paleo" for short. Advocates of this diet focus on eating unprocessed foods like lean meat, seafood, roots, tubers, fruits, and vegetables. Not only are these foods comprehensible to the human digestive system, they pack much more nutrition per calorie than typical Neolithic and processed foods.

In terms of what not to eat, followers of the Paleo diet refrain from eating grains, legumes, and dairy — each of which contains toxic elements that our bodies have never had a chance to adapt to. These foods fatten our physiques and shorten our lives. Paleo advocates claim that by avoiding these foods, and eating more along the lines of how our ancestors ate, we can stave off such problems as obesity, diabetes, cancer, and cardiac disease.

The Paleo Pushers

One of the leaders of the Paleo movement is biochemist Matt Lalonde. He believes that the "eating like a caveman" approach is helpful, but incomplete. It's not enough to just eat in an apparently evolutionary-friendly way. Rather, we need to do actual science and determine optimal eating habits. It just turns out that his findings tend to support the central assumption made by Paleo advocates.

Science also brushes shoulders with Paleo at the Ancestral Health Symposiums that are held once a year. Last year's confab featured over 50 speakers representing a diverse cross-section of disciplines. Titles of presentations included, "The Trouble with Fructose: A Darwinian Perspective", "Heart Disease and Molecular Degeneration", and "What Foods Make My Brain Work Best?" The symposiums have featured heavy hitters in the health sciences, including Loren Cordain, Gary Taubes, and Robb Wolf. These symposiums demonstrate how a niche group of scientists, medical practitioners, and health experts are paving the way for what is likely to become a health and wellness paradigm for the future.

The problem with Neolithic food

One of the many refrains of the Paleo movement is that Neolithic foods cause a number of health problems. Take whole grains for example. Paleo advocates believe that a primary reason for our poor health relative to our Paleolithic ancestors is the introduction of a protein called gluten, which is found in many staple grains.

That's because gluten may, in fact, be a poison. Many plants have evolved chemical defenses to dissuade animals from eating them. Think of it as a kind of chemical warfare, with gluten being a particularly nasty weapon. It turns out that people suffering from the celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disorder, aren't the only ones sensitive to gluten. In fact, it has been shown that all humans react poorly to it.

According to Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet, it's for this reason that everyone should avoid gluten which tends to be delivered by consuming whole grains. Other foods that cause similar reactions include lectins, phytates, and protease inhibitors. Together, these compounds limit protein and mineral absorption while inflicting severe inflammatory responses. Wolf compares this effect to having poison oak lining our intestinal walls.

These gut-inflaming elements cause inflammation to the digestive tract, and by consequence, to the rest of the body. And as we're increasingly learning, inflammation is a contributor to a number of health problems, including impairments to the immune system and the body's ability to recover.

Wolf also suggests we stay away from legumes, dairy, sugar, and processed vegetable oils. These have the same gut-irritating and inflammation-promoting properties. As a result, Paleo devotees tend to refrain from cheese, milk, soy products, and peanuts, which technically speaking is a legume. They also avoid all processed foods, which tends to be laden in added chemicals and preservatives.

At the same time, Paleo devotees laud the benefits of fat. Not only does it taste good and have the ability to stave off depression, it's fairly essential. Robb Wolf is a big promoter of increasing our total fat intake, suggesting that we consume half of our calories from fat.

Indeed, the hysteria against fat is starting to wane. The findings of a recent meta-analysis of 21 studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition supports the revelation that no single study could associate saturated fat with increased risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, or coronary vascular disease. And at the same time, it does the mind and body good.

An indelible component of Paleo is eating meat. It's valued highly for its protein, fats, and essential nutrients. But not all meat is the same. Folks on the Paleo diet place considerable emphasis on eating grass fed organic meats as opposed to grain fed stock raised in factory farms. It's been shown that grain fed beef contributes to a skewed omega 3 to 6 ratio and that it impairs our ability to absorb nutrients. Factory farms also infuse their livestock with hormones and other questionable chemical concoctions. Paleo dieters are increasingly turning away from these foods, preferring instead to eat "clean" meat.

It's for this reason that dairy tends to be vilified in Paleo circles. Most milk comes from grain fed beef and cause the same inflammatory problems as the meat. Cows, it would seem, react just as badly from gluten in grains as humans do.

What about the ethics?

Critics of the Paleo diet complain that the meat-centric approach is completely out of line with other trends, namely the shift to vegetarian diets. Paleo eaters are often seen by vegetarians and vegans as a selfish group that are looking to take society backwards instead of forward.

Ancestral health enthusiasts, on the other hand, make the claim that they are in fact charting a course to the future by overturning conventional models of meat production. Paleo eaters tend to avoid factory farmed foods, insteading buying organic and free range meats and eggs from farmer's markets and organic food stores. Moreover, they are also advocates of sustainable, humanitarian farming practices and the promotion of healthy, untainted foods. An animal that got to live its life on a farm grazing in pasture, they argue, is a far cry from the crammed and deplorable conditions found in most factory farms. It's for this reason that they claim to be "conscious carnivores" and purveyors of a more sustainable future.

Quality, rather than quantity, is a central tenant of the Paleo diet. It's for this reason that people on Paleo are content to spend two to three times more on their foods than what's found at regular supermarkets.

Clearly, Paelo meat-eaters and vegetarians are going to forever disagree on the ethics of the matter. Fundamentally, vegetarians argue that it's never right to raise, kill, and eat another animal, whereas Paleo folk contend that personal health takes precedent, and that it's normal and natural for us to eat meat; it's what we're evolved for.

Dietary habits are an incredibly personal thing. Fewer subjects raise more controversy and heated opinions than food politics. Ultimately, however, when it comes down to making dietary choices, it tends to be about what works best for the individual - whether it be on account of health, environmental, or ethical considerations.

Essentially, people need to ask themselves about how their food choices make them feel about themselves as moral agents, and how those choices impact on their personal health and well-being.

[This post has been edited slightly to underscore the fact that the Paleo diet is based on speculation informed by science, rather than scientific evidence. - Ed.]

http://io9.com/5917339/why-eating-l...y-of-the-future
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  #155   ^
Old Tue, Jun-12-12, 14:00
Nancy LC's Avatar
Nancy LC Nancy LC is offline
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Essentially, people need to ask themselves about how their food choices make them feel about themselves as moral agents, and how those choices impact on their personal health and well-being.

Moral agents? I'll start worrying about that when a lioness start worrying over the welfare of the water buffalo's they're stalking and consider eating bamboo shoots because it's more moral.
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  #156   ^
Old Tue, Jun-12-12, 18:07
aj_cohn's Avatar
aj_cohn aj_cohn is offline
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Plan: Protein Power
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Well, knock me over with a feather! I never thought I'd live to see such a reasonable summary of the Paleo diet and movement in a layman's article in the English-speaking press, outside of a LC/paleo advocacy site.
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  #157   ^
Old Tue, Jun-12-12, 18:48
mio1996's Avatar
mio1996 mio1996 is offline
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Plan: Primal-VLC
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Quote:
Originally Posted by *Caz*
Oh I had a diet coke habit of 4 - 6 litres a day (130 to 200 US fluid ounces).
Harder to kick than cigarettes, easier to kick than sugar!

I can relate: the first time I lc'd I routinely drank a 12-pack of canned Diet Mountain Dew most days


Quote:
Advocates of this diet focus on eating unprocessed foods like lean meat, seafood, roots, tubers, fruits, and vegetables.
Is this true? I though most Paleo experts expressly forbid the consumption of tubers? Actually, this article itself lists potatoes as one of the bad foods
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  #158   ^
Old Tue, Jun-12-12, 20:16
aj_cohn's Avatar
aj_cohn aj_cohn is offline
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Plan: Protein Power
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Most paleo advocates promote eating tubers in the form of sweet potatoes, because they're high in amylopectin, a type of starch that breaks down slowly. Once I healed my gut and got to goal weight, I started eating them the night before a weightlifting workout and in my post-workout meal. It helps create glycogen stores necessary for intense exercise and replenish them afterwards.
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  #159   ^
Old Sat, Jul-14-12, 03:28
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
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Default The caveman diet: Meat-eaters love it, critics call it ‘a craze’

Quote:
From The Vancouver Sun
July 13, 2012


The caveman diet: Meat-eaters love it, critics call it ‘a craze’

Fruits, nuts, grass and whatever grubs, insects or game you can kill with your hands or a rock.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived on a daily menu of whatever was at hand until the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, and a surprising number of dieters and fitness buffs are turning back their dietary clocks.

In a nutshell, the paleodiet is an attempt to approximate the caloric and nutritional intake that human beings evolved to eat, before we started to plant grain and legumes for their easy, abundant, but largely empty, calories. Or so the theory goes.

The modern menu includes grass-fed meats, fruits, cooked and raw vegetables, wild fish and unprocessed oils such as olive or avocado. Wheat, dairy and legumes, such as beans and peanuts, are not allowed because they are relatively recent additions to the human menu. Some versions forbid added salt. Most people limit or eliminate alcohol.

“It’s really popular, at least half the people at my gym are eating something like the caveman diet,” said Cassandra Kruger, a trainer at Momentum Fitness in Vancouver. “It’s in the same vein as the South Beach and Atkins diet in that they don’t include any refined carbohydrates, so no grains, no sugar, no flour and no processed foods.”

Some nutritionists warn that low-carb diets carry potential health hazards from kidney stones and low blood pressure to calcium deficiency and osteoporosis.

Ultralow carb diets induce ketosis, a state in which the body burns fat for energy. You will lose weight, but it is not without risk.

Warehouse manager Rahim Khan of Langley started on the paleodiet just before his 27th birthday. He weighed 250 pounds, heavy for his 5-foot-11 frame.

“Less than a year later I hit my optimal weight of 173 pounds,”said Khan, who lost weight even as he cut back on his workouts. “I used to be in the gym three or four days a week and sometimes for two hours, now it’s 30 minutes and I’m out.”

Khan, his wife Liz and their three children all follow the paleodiet at home. Exceptions have to be made when the kids visit their grandparents, Khan laughed.

“I was skeptical at first,” said Liz, who admits feeling sick and lethargic for the first two weeks after the change. “But I feel so much better now, I didn’t even know how lousy I felt before.”

The Khans eat grass-fed beef, pork and chicken, usually the fattiest cuts they can find. Wheat in all its forms has disappeared, along with soy and corn. Dairy is confined to butter and small amounts of aged cheese.

Fruits and vegetables make up the balance of the plate, which Rahim says he usually fills twice at supper time. When their personal workload gets heavy, the Khans will add a sweet potato with butter for extra energy.

“I like to just call it my lifestyle, it’s the most logical way to eat,” Rahim said. “What I do is based on the feedback my body gives. When I feel good I know I’m doing the right things.”

The cavemen diet is an attractive weight-management program, because it is naturally low in calories and you are generally encouraged to eat whenever you are hungry. But the paleolithic menu probably has the most traction with people who have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease.

“Just look at how many people are eliminating gluten from their diet,” Kruger said.

Indeed, gluten-free foods are among the fastest growing product classes at the grocery store. And theceliacscene.com lists dozens of restaurants across Metro Vancouver that offer gluten-free meals.

Chilliwack mom Lori Wedel made some paleolithic adjustments to her entire family’s diet to address her and her daughter Eva’s gluten sensitivity.

“When Eva was three or four we started noticing that she was having trouble with her digestion,” said Wedel, a community support worker.

Gluten sensitivity can cause symptoms including constipation, diarrhea and abdominal pain.

“We decided we needed to investigate what might be the problem and we started to do an elimination diet,” she recalled.

Eva showed no change when dairy was removed from the menu. “But when we got to gluten it was completely different and rapidly different,” she said. “Within a week we noticed big changes, some we didn’t expect.”

“We thought she was a typical four-year-old until we started changing her diet,” Wedel said. “She was a terror with concentration problems and aggression, but once we started removing gluten it changed altogether.”

Wedel’s own allergies to nuts and to seafood meant there were few processed foods in the house anyway, but even fewer when the family began to eliminate sugar, artificial colourings and gluten.

“The difference in Eva made it impossible to go back,” Wedel said. “We can’t eat another way.”

Rather than keeping abundant carbohydrates in their diet with gluten-free breads and pasta, the Wedels just eliminated bread and grain-based foods such as pasta. At $7 a loaf for gluten-free bread, it just didn’t make sense.

“We eat meat every day and a whack of vegetables, usually in a stir-fry,” she said. “We don’t follow the strict paleodiet, if we have sushi we eat the rice and sometimes we have quinoa.”

Even though the Wedels don’t consider themselves paleodieters, Eva likes to joke that she is a caveman child. Lori’s husband Will, an engineer with the City of Chilliwack, is a big fan of the hefty portions of meat, usually chicken, pork and grass-fed beef.

“For me the biggest change was just deciding that not every meal had to be like my mom taught me, meat, potatoes, grain, you don’t need those to live,” she said.

Wedel’s sister Brittany Eidsness, a registered holistic nutritionist, helped tweak the family’s menus.

When calories from wheat, rice, potatoes and refined sugar are eliminated from the diet, the ratio of fibre, vitamins, minerals and important nutrients per calorie consumed goes way up.

The exception is vitamin D, which hunter gatherers produced in great abundance because they lived outdoors and spent long hours walking and foraging.

“People have a hard time figuring out what to eat and this diet is healthy and very clear,” she said. “It removes all of the foods that cause us problems.”

Proponents of the caveman diet point out that so-called “diseases of civilization” — heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes — were not a problem to people who lived in the Paleolithic period, which ran from about 2.5 million years ago until farming took hold about 8,000 BCE.

“The paleodiet is naturally low-carb and focuses on clean protein sources like grass-fed beef, wild fish, naturally raised chicken and eggs,” said Eidsness. “Then you are going to have as many vegetables as you can possibly eat, with the possible exception of nightshade vegetables for people who are sensitive to them.”

Stricter paleodieters avoid eating members of the nightshade family, which includes peppers, eggplant, tomatoes and potatoes, in the belief that they cause loss of calcium and may trigger arthritis or autoimmune disease.

People transitioning to the caveman diet can expect a minor rebellion by their body. Many people experience lethargy, headaches and flu-like symptoms that Eidsness attributes to a withdrawal from the body’s addiction to sugar and carbohydrates.

Critics of the paleodiet trend point to a long list of incongruities, knowledge gaps about the true nature of man’s diet during the Paleolithic period.

A true paleolithic diet would probably include some wild game, tart berries, insects, roots and wild tubers, shellfish, rodents and the occasional cache of honey. But it would also vary enormously from north to south, coast to inland and continent to continent, ranging from a chimpanzee-like diet of fruits to a very fatty meat-based diet of seal and caribou consumed by Arctic peoples.

The truth is that defining a true paleolithic diet is next to impossible.

What we do know is that the abundant calories of cultivated grain gave rise to a massive human population boom and gave birth to permanent sedentary civilization, both of which roil unabated to this day.

In addition to the potential for health impacts from eating an ultra low-carb diet, a leading Canadian nutritionist warns that paleodieters often eat more meat than is healthy for them and the planet.

The environmental cost of a largely meat-based diet is probably the strongest argument against eating like a modern caveman, said David Jenkins, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Nutrition and Metabolism.

“We just can’t produce enough calories in meat protein and fat to feed the world’s human population, it’s not sustainable,” Jenkins said.

Widely accepted estimates suggest it takes 16 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of beef and at least 441 gallons of water.

“The [caveman diet] craze is interesting in that it focuses on increased fibre foods, but people get bored of fibre if you can’t have it as bread or pasta or rice,” Jenkins said. “These are the starchy staples that allowed us to multiply on the face of the planet.”

Caveman diet proponents claim that eating what they believe to be the human ancestral diet will reduce their risk of disease, pointing out that Paleolithic era people were not afflicted with today’s most common ailments, many of which are associated with obesity and old age.

That idea might just hold water.

Pre-agricultural humans did live long enough to suffer from diseases of age and there is evidence arthritis was common, though obesity, heart disease and diabetes were rare or entirely absent.

Jenkins is skeptical that such dramatic alterations in our modern diet are key to better health.

“The first step in adopting a paleolithic lifestyle would be to throw away your car keys and walk everywhere,” he said. “The diet we have adopted over the past 10,000 years suits our physiology just fine if we are exercising. The problem is we put all these starchy calories in our body and then try to burn them driving everywhere in our cars.”

Quote:
POLL: Could you live on the Paleo diet alone?
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/fo...2070/story.html
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/...1890/story.html
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