Can any of you low carb paleo people help me understand why the paleo community seems to hate low carb so much?

I'm not defensive, I'm capable of being shown I'm wrong, but I don't understand the "hard on hormones" "bad for thyroid" and other vague dismissals of low carb. I'm not talking about the paleo argument against frankenfoods-low-carb, which I get, that's in line with the main paleo principles.

I keep seeing so many insistent people in paleo talking about "safe starches" "starch is necessary" and such, and it sounds just as flimsy as the "balanced diet" advice I see everywhere non-paleo. I just don't understand the argument they make.

(Geeky explanations and links very welcome - I'm pretty well read on primal/paleo/low-carb and just feel like I'm obtuse for not understanding the hate for low carb here...)

Paleo proponents (not all, Dr. Noakes one good example) want to distance themselves from Atkins, which doesn't have the most stellar of reputations in the nutrition world. Here is a comparison from 2011: http://www.paleoplan.com/2011/11-17...er-than-atkins/ Although I eat VLC, I agree with these criticisms…so no products, AS, processed seed oils, etc.

Not all paleo people do. Most paleos on this site are also low carb. I'm starting to experiment with resistant starch a little. People tend to get religious behind their dietary beliefs and defend them rabidly at times. That goes for Atkins people as well as Paleo.

I'm not 100% sure that there isn't some reasonable science behind the claims for RS. I'm rethinking that a bit. My own experience has been that increasing my starch consumption is making some things better, some worse.

Here's a recent thread regarding RS and a long time low carb blogger (Tom McNaughton of Fat Head fame) doing three exhaustive interviews with various folks.

http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=459592

Where? Here? Links?

I was also curious about this as well!

Great Thread!

I think diehard paleos are a bit like diehard vegans, passionate and sometimes overly so. I've learned to take food the same way I take religion, do what works for me and leave the rest. It just so happens that the link Jey posted cites all the reasons paleo works for me. But if Atkins devotees want to add back grains or brown rice, and that works for them, who is anyone to judge?

I've never noticed any "disharmony" between the two. Broadly speaking, low carb without the dairy isnt it?

Jo xxx

Hi hi! I listen to a lot of Paleo stuff and mostly eat "Paleo" foods, on the lower carb side of things.

A lot of the criticism comes because Paleo and crossfit exercise are closely linked (they originated in the same circle, and Paleo is often recommended to crossfitters). Crossfit is seen as an activity requiring glycogen, so omitting starch/fruit is seen as detrimental. That said, the last time I saw a poster re: nutrition in a crossfit gym, it specified "limit fruit"!

Also Paleo is a whole "Lifestyle". http://www.marksdailyapple.com/10-p.../#axzz30M2yyKLY

It is not just a "Diet" so the Lifestyle aspect can bring out the "Paleo Perfectionists".

Thanks for the answers.

I guess there is still a part of the question unclear to me.

I actually agree on the food quality points of the paleo critique of Atkins (or other low carb). The food quality argument is particularly valid to critique Atkins per se (a critique many on this site share from what I've seen, with the promotion of Atkins bars, shakes, candy...)

I've actually personally always been whole-foods Atkins and just because of my own preferences never ate seed oils, we are foodies and buy very high quality pastured meat, etc so I'd say I've always been "primal" even if I feel more comfortable in the "low carb" label.

And I can accept the lifestyle factors as good advice (even if I don't follow most of them, largely because I'm far more focused on weight than the other stuff and also because I have little kids and the sleep recommendations sound dreamy but laughable at this stage of my life! But the lifestyle advice doesn't explain the dissing of low carb.

The crossfit/heavy exercise argument is a sound one to me. I'm sure some of the hard core athletes need more carbs than I do, and while maybe they can do low carb and exercise like they want to, maybe they can't, or don't want to, fair enough.

Of course, one thing that seems so strange is how the paleo community generally accepts, or even advocates for "cheat meals" and "80/20" rules, which frankly bring their diets farther afield from their ideals than most Atkins-bar-drinking low carbers are probably doing...

But I guess the stuff that I'm still not understanding is the "hard on the adrenals" and "bad for thyroid" arguments against low carb paleo for healthy weight loss. The frequent advice I see in paleoland to tell other paleo followers that they need to eat more starch, as opposed to dissing the Atkins community.

I actually just spent a few minutes googling, looking for an example of the paleo-hate I'm talking about, and instead ran across this article (well, it's a whole series, but this was the best of the bunch) of Robb Wolf's take on low carb. And basically he concludes that for anyone "doughy in the middle" (sheepishly raises hand!) that low carb is advisable.

http://robbwolf.com/2013/01/09/thou...episode-3-hope/

So I'll just dismiss the "paleo perfectionists" for now. It's true that I'm following several "perfectionist" things these days, AIP is very demanding and rigorous.

In the thyroid guide published by Abbott (the maker's of Synthroid, I believe) it says something to the effect of you need 50g of carb a day to support your thyroid.

Lots of people do have low T3 conversion on LC. I know I do. However, I'm not sure I wouldn't also have poor T3 on a low calorie diet as well.

I don't think it harms your thyroid, it just is how your thyroid responds, or body responds, when you're dieting.

Paris - I think it helps to look at 80/20 the way it was originally proposed. The idea is that you have friends and family who will cook for you, or want you to go to restaurants with them. When you order, say, fish and a veggies there, or your mom makes salad and meat and bread, you can skip the bread and ask them to leave cheese off your veggies, but it becomes very hard (as you know) to regulate what they are cooking in (seed oils, butter), whether they added bread crumbs to your meatballs, sugar to your salad dressing, etc. the 80/20 was supposed to be about doing it the best you can and not stressing about the 20 percent of meals you aren't directly in control of.

I do see a lot of people take it the way you do - I do 80/20, but the 20 percent to me is seed oils/dairy/legumes, not 20% of the week in donuts.

And I would add "diehard low carbers" into this mix. While it doesn't address your specific questions, I think the fact that people do get rabid about their nutritional beliefs contribues to the bias against other ways of eating.

I've seen on this very board references like (paraphrasing) "Atkins is the only way to eat", "Low carbing is the only way to truly be healthy" and discussions in the Research/Media subforum where the LC bias is well and truly evident, in that study methodology is picked apart in great detail when a study doesn't support a low carb construct...but the reponse to a supportive study is often...well, yeah, we knew that...without as much discussion given to potential methodological issues.

Please don't get me wrong--I think we're a pretty educated, open-minded bunch here--but despite this, It's almost impossible to remain neutral/unbiased about something you're passionate about and believe in.

And so there will always be a subset of the folks who believe something different who look for evidence, no matter how tenuous, to support their own cause/demonize another.

For this kind of thing, you really need to separate out hormonal changes due to weight loss itself, or excessive exercise. Especially for women, but also for men. Fertility and hormonal issues aren't uncommon in female athletes, whatever their diet, or in women who get "ripped," again, whatever their diet. Which makes sense from an ancestral viewpoint, for our female ancestors getting pregnant during a calorie deficit forced on them by the environment, rather than by choice, would have been dangerous and would have decreased rather than decreased the probability of their getting to be our ancestors.

Give a type II diabetic a gastric bypass, and very often their diabetes goes into remission. They lose weight as well. But gastric bypass can also make people prone to hypoglycemia. I always wonder if this is a tendency to hypoglycemia that was masked by the diabetes. Because type II diabetes, whatever else it is, is usually preventative of hypoglycemia. Hyperglycemia does most of its damage long-term, hypoglycemia is a more immediate threat. Perhaps some other conditions that some people experience on low carb diets were previously masked by the effects of overweight or obesity.

What gets me is this;



http://www.lowcarb.ca/atkins-diet-a...-donaldson.html

Or you could go back to Steffanson. Not all paleo diets were low carbohydrate, but certainly some of them were, and if low carb is trying to co-opt paleo, then that's not exactly a new development. From where I sit, it's always looked like the modern paleo movement, to a large degree, sprang from the low-carb movement, or at least low carbers were among the earliest proponents of a particular style of paleolithic diet.


http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?...;view=1up;seq=7

The book's readable here, it's listed as public domain.


I love the posts over at Free the Animal supposed to show that the Inuit ate a non-ketogenic diet. Very small sample sizes in the "eskimo's didn't do ketosis" studies, plus the ketones are checked through the urine. In the summer, when the fat portion of the diet was the lowest. One study had three subjects, one of them breastfeeding. Just about everybody here probably already knows that an all meat diet isn't necessarily going to put a person in ketosis 100 percent of the time.

There's also some stuff over there about the glycogen content of whale blubber being higher in glycogen than we'd have suspected, sometimes as high as 25 to 30 percent of the calories. This happens in the leanest cuts, which are also the smallest part of the animal's blubber. Towards the tail. The more massive cuts of blubber are also the fattest, and much much lower in carbohydrate. The heart also has higher glycogen levels than usual. But on a glycogen/total calories available from an animal basis, I suspect that whales and other arctic mammals have less carbohydrate stores than animals farther south do, rather than more. Kind of hard to find the study. Or to do the study. Full grown whales are kind of unwieldy.

Whale milk has something like fifty percent fat, not by calories, by volume. And almost no carbohydrate. There might be a clue in that somewhere--when the whale itself goes scrounging around for calories for its calves, mostly what it comes back with is fat.

The only paleo site I read regularly is Mark's daily apple, and his posts seem very friendly to LC. He often comments on how if you tend to be overweight you should be more careful of higher-carb fruits, even paleo-friendly ones.

The forums there are a different story. I don't check them often but when I have it seems there are a lot of people who pounce on anyone who doesn't follow what they think is the only or best way to be paleo.

I often look up paleo recipes because they tend to be more focused on grass-fed meats, for example.

I still think the basic core Atkins plan is elegant, easy to follow, and very similar to paleo or ketogenic diets. The trendiness of paleo (and all the freaking research and statistics) can be a little much and I'm skeptical of the jockeying for who's more right than the others.

MDA though is a solid site and a great resource for a lot of things, including recipes.