This is just a snippet from a portion of an interview:



I only pulled out this snippet because of the mention about how mismatched we are to a diet high in sugars and starches. He focuses mainly on dental cavities from that mismatched diet, but actually mentions other health concerns such as diabetes and obesity.

There's a larger excerpt of the interview, plus a link to a podcast of the full interview at this link:

https://www.theringer.com/2024/4/2/...d-staying-alive

I have not listened to the interview - but he makes it clear in the except that he really hates the paleo diet or the idea of any diet being referred to as optimal.

Thanks for the warning. Because already these two statements don't match up to me, and I don't want to hear a whole interview full of cognitive dissonance.

I think the reason he puts it that way is mostly because he thinks of people and animals adapting to their environment. But he realizes that it takes eons to adapt - Another snippet:




So he realizes that farm food (grains, sugars) are not something we're adapted to - I'm not sure whether or not he realizes that humans aren't likely to ever adapt to it, because in some ways he makes it sound like it's possible.

The food has changed way too fast for adaptation to occur - and the food continues to change at a rate that even if we were to fully adapt to the early agriculture food in another 20,000 years, we still wouldn't be caught up with what's out there now.

Many people have been able to *tolerate* those grains and sugars with minimal problems, but they aren't really adapted to them - they aren't really good for their health, even if they aren't showing any obvious signs of problems from those foods.

The rest of us have a low tolerance level (or no tolerance for them at all), especially as what could be considered the ongoing industrial revolution in food production has resulted in UPFs with a high addictive factor, resulting in obesity on a large scale, and all the associated illnesses.

But it does go back to we simply don't have the digestive system, metabolism, etc to really handle the current foods.

His attitude about paleo and hating the word optimal in relation to diet is silly - paleo is much closer to what our bodies can handle due to the lack of grains and added sugars, although certainly not an ideal diet for some.

And really - finding foods these days that are truly the same as our paleo ancestors would have eaten? Not likely - even without GMO everything has been cross pollinated and hybridized to produce fruits and veggies that are nothing like what paleos subsisted on. Even our livestock have been bred for certain characteristics to provide more food. As unlike true paleo as the current "paleo diet" is, it's still the closest we're going to get to it though.

The book, death by food pyramid, led to the the idea of inherited enzymes, and how it shaped the diets of our ancestors.

I did a geographic analysis and that explains why I do well on a low plant diet, Carnivore but not exclusively. My ancestors were eating lots of high mountain/North Atlantic patterns.

That's what works for me now. A sibling might have gotten a difference mix. But none of us will do well unless we eat low carb.

Another Evolutionary Biologist theorizes we can tolerate different diets by our age.



https://podcast.mikkiwilliden.com/212

If anyone on this board has developed opposite routes to success, it's probably JEY and I I had to cut carbs back and she had to add them in. I lean carnivore and she's more omnivore.

So I was thinking about how unhappy we'd probably be on a reality show called, "Food Swap." And it would make as much sense as 90 Day Fiance. Yes, I moved in with DH about 90 days after we started dating, but we'd been friends for months before that. Here we are 23 years later, still happy about it... but I'm not recommending it for everyone.



Why would he HATE the paleo diet? I'm not curious enough to explore, but Why? Doesn't every other species have a species-optimum diet? Which varies, like finches on Galapagos, by environmental pressure. But we are all, still, the SAME species, which is a blend of many more kinds of early people than we'd ever imagined before DNA analysis.

I do think our inherited enzymes follow our DNA pattern. If we have a lowlands tropical background, like Pacific island cultures, Gary Taubes has evidence that fish and coconut keeps Islanders healthy, while the supply ship that took a while to repair carried Western Industrialized diet, and the Islanders got sick again.

But it doesn't mean they can only eat fish and coconut. They can move to some other country and eat their food. Often, with great enjoyment!

If he's trying to say everyone should respect their own variations regarding diet, great, but why would he HATE the paleo diet? When Neanderthin was truly groundbreaking, I admire Primal from Mark Sisson because he thinks dairy is fine for those who tolerate it (the Masai don't suffer from it,) and Wheatbelly explained it.

This is why we must be careful of evolutionary biology at this point in time. It's mostly guesswork, and invaded by scientist ego. Whatever they think they think, personally, gets expressed in these theories, which have very little evidentiary basis by their nature. I'm still shocked at some of the unscientific speculation I've read in books that got published.

I "jumped the line" of such speculation when I got my DNA geography. I may have been born in farm country, but my ancestors' environment wouldn't allow for much agriculture. Fishing far north and grazing cows on summer mountain tops is where my genetics come from.

But would I thrive on fish and coconut the same way? Probably. I eat a lot of it now. Because my body likes it.



Beans try to kill me, while dairy hasn't given me a bit of trouble when I eat it fermented, as I do. Unless it's heavy cream, which is only fat. I avoid lectins in milk, apparently, by not liking milk.

One would think Dr. Gundry would be a carnivore advocate. But he still wants me to eat a plant-based diet! His recipes would KILL me. I'd have to eat so much plant stuff to get to enough protein. He's right... but he's wrong; to focus on only one thing.

I've concluded Dr. Gundry still struggles to reconcile his training as a cardiologist with his knowledge of lectins.



I've bolded the ones loaded with oxalates. A big flare was from a celery and carrot plate we had for the holidays one year. One of my first oxalate lessons

Just trying to illustrate how far astray a person can be led by focusing on one thing. Trying to avoid lectins ran me aground on a different plant poison. Am I just more allergic to plants than average? Probably. I don't have the enzymes to disable all of this plant stuff.

Plus, I've learned, more people are having plant trouble than before, because our modern plant stuff has extra issues. It's not traditional farming & food prep. In a recent discussion, Calianna and I shared how we both grew up with a tradition of boiling vegetables to death. They no longer soak beans, they just can them.

But now, fresh, they are served al dente... and have more toxins as a result. Bred for bigness and beauty, which dilutes the nutrients. Harvested green and soaked in chemicals to retard spoilage. Sprayed with oxalate to delay yellowing, because they are stored longer and longer for maximum profit. And soaked in Roundup constantly... and we know now... too close to harvest.

All at the very point in time when we are supposed to make that 3/4ths of our diet?

This isn't about nutrition. This is deliberate confusion and lying about the effects of their greed.

This is so important to understand. These evolutionary theories are only speculation and cannot be proven. They often simply reflect a person’s bias or agenda rather than fact.

I still haven't listened to the interview, so I still don't know exactly what he has against paleo.

He doesn't actually condemn paleo - just seems to hate the term or that limiting yourself to the produce dept and the meat/fish dept of the grocery store is the same as hunter-gatherer foods and nothing else. If you go back to primitive versions of foods available in the wild, they would have been very different from what's in the grocery stores today that's considered appropriate for a paleo diet. There's nothing in the produce dept or the meat dept that's not the result of cross pollinating or breeding programs to produce a prettier/larger/better product. Even wild caught fish and seafood - they may be as close to paleo as we can get for those foods, but they've still been affected by the world we live in today. We also aren't going out in the wild and hunting it down with spear/trapping with snares or gathering it from the wild ourselves - which in and of itself was part of the whole eating experience for paleos.

I think he's also mocking that there's ONE TRUE WAY to eat for everyone on the planet, that it's a single diet called paleo, and that ideal diet is is the same for everyone, no matter what part of the world their genetic origins, and the small genetic adaptations or predispositions to the food in their environment which might have occurred along the way as populations spread out across the planet - some ending up in tropical environments where the plant and animal species were very different from the plant and animal species in Nordic countries, which were very different from plant and animal species in North America, and so on.

A paleo diet seems to be all over the place - and yet not. Not every part of the world where people spread out to had wild grapes growing, so going through the grocery store and saying "Grapes are paleo" doesn't necessarily apply to the last hundred generations of every individual's genetic make-up. I personally can't eat grapes (or anything made from grapes) without digestive distress. I apparently lack some digestive related gene that allowed almost everyone else in the family to use grape products with no problem.

Most of us have genes that adapted to do well on dairy, despite dairy not being considered paleo. Some of us would not do well at all if we had to completely eliminate all dairy from our diets in order to uphold some ideal of paleo eating.

But I think this is a big part of the point he's trying to get across:



He doesn't say this as such, but of course having all those babies and having them healthy enough to survive until their fertile years and reproduce their own healthy babies - that means the diet also needed to provide at least enough nutrients to each generation to result in healthy babies. Which means that what they were eating was working at a time when there were so many things that could snuff out a life in short order - not just attacks from wild animals, but also being so hungry that you ate some kind of plant or fruit that you didn't know was poisonous, or getting a scratch that became infected, turned septic and killed you.

I think the part about "we didn't evolve to be happy and healthy and nice" is part of what he's trying to get across - it was literally survival of the fittest and most aggressive, especially when it came to food. You had to get out there and hunt down/gather whatever food you could before someone else got it, because if you don't get it first, you'll do without, which will make you weak and less able to be the first to hunt down/gather food tomorrow. That aggressive nature still survives today - we have to be taught to tamp down our innate desire to think only of "my needs first" and be considerate of the needs of others.

This too.

They can find all kinds of evidence - but evidence is subject to interpretation, and those interpretations are often influenced by other interpretations.

When it comes down to it, in the end we all need to find our own way in our dietary choices, because no matter what "evidence" they point to, if a particular food or diet doesn't work for you, you won't be able to force it work for you.

And . . . I would add . . . the need to receive funding to justify that one can make a living being an evolutionary biologist. Kinda reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George portrayed himself as a marine biologist in order to impress a love interest. Now, maybe I'm being too hard on evolutionary biologists, but nawww:

"The sea was angry that day, my friends. Like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli." - George Costanza

ETA: Okay, I couldn't resist. It's worth a laugh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEvOU2HKhzw

I'm convinced there's a Seinfeld scene for every online need!

DH was not a fan when we met, but I explained that it's a slow burn of accumulated jokes which build through the series. Once we learn the in-show references, it's even funnier



See? This is true of fish, but humans (among others) are social animals. So people who are past reproductive age become "wisdom containers" and they CAN contribute to the species even after reproduction ceases.

WHY else do we live so long? Huh? The quote acts like we're amoebas or something. This isn't science at all!