Eat Like a Caveman? Field Notes from a Conference on the Paleo Diet

I generally support the Paleo diet approach to health and nutrition - aside from my unwillingness to give up cheese, Greek yogurt, or cottage cheese. As far as the rest is concerned, the diet has proven repeatedly to perform better than low-fat diets, vegetarian diets, and every other kind of diet in terms of improving metabolic disorders and blood lipid profiles. And it's easier than Atkins.

Eat Like a Caveman? Field Notes from a Conference on the Paleo Diet 

Matthew C. Nisbet on August 9, 2011

--Guest post by Patrick Riley, AoE Culture Correspondent

Here is a section of the longer article - the names given below contain links to their respective sites in the original article, so if you want to know more about them, go to Big Think.

By now you've heard of the Paleo Diet or the Caveman Diet, what Details magazine called one side in "an epic struggle" underway between "meat lovers and vegans." It generally refers to eating like our hunter-gather ancestors (and more recent tribes) who ate animals and vegetables - but little or no sugar, grains, legumes, vegetable oils or dairy (though many people prefer to ignore that last one) - and apparently weren't affected by obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer etc.

If it's known in the mainstream as yet another fad lifestyle favoring Atkins-sized portions of meat, lifting heavy things, and barefoot running, many of its practitioners aren't in it just for the grass-fed steak. They see it as a way to fix the planet, to make up for the processed food and the factory farming that has been our gift to the world along with pop culture and Levis. So while in some sense this was indeed a Comic-Con for the Vibram FiveFingers set, it was also a remarkable sign of our times.

Having just arrived in Southern California from an extended stay in Vietnam provided me with a perspective of the two ends of the eating spectrum.

In Vietnam, they eat healthily without even trying. They're rightfully proud of their customary cuisine in which every meal includes a balance of vegetables, meat and white rice. They have holidays where specific bitter or fermented foods are eaten to cleanse the system (though such foods are eaten regularly too). Sure, junk food is consumed, but at a level probably similar to that of the '60s or '70s in the U.S.

However, some Vietnamese people have started to accept both the standard Western thinking on nutrition, i.e. the low-fat, whole grain approach, and the Western reality of fast and processed foods. What's more, just like in the U.S., most of the meat consumed there is not from the local farm, it's from factories using feed imported from American agribusiness giants like Cargill. How else to feed a nation of 87 million people?

Back in the USA, at the other end of the spectrum, where the factory farm was invented and continues to thrive, there are, ironically, people who want to answer that question.

This is not exactly news, and it's not limited to this group: we're familiar with Whole Foods and Michael Pollan (whose The Omnivore's Dilemma I've just gotten around to reading). I'm not going to get Jack Shafer on my case by saying that Paleo eating is a "growing trend" but it does seem to have taken off in the past year and a half that I've been following it – and employing it to end several years of quasi-veganism that left me rather malnourished.

So this event, organized by two California-based researchers, was an opportune chance for nutrition big-wigs and popular bloggers alike to mingle with each other and those they influence. Held at UCLA, but not by UCLA, it mixed the scientific ("Heart Disease and Molecular Degeneration," presented by doctoral candidate Chris Masterjohn) with the practical ("MovNat: Evolutionarily natural fitness" by Erwan LeCorre).

Loren Cordain, PhD, was there to talk about the movement he helped popularize with his first book in 2000. Authors such as Michael Eades, MD, Mark Sisson and Robb Wolf put live faces to their own influential diet books. Health issues like the increasingly understood importance of good gut flora was touched on in presentations by bloggers Dr. BG (with Dr. Tim Gerstmar), and Melissa McEwan. Denise Minger, famous or infamous in certain circles for her in-depth statistics-heavy take-down of T. Colin Campbell's The China Study was a popular presenter. Paleo author Nora Gedgaudas was one of several to talk about the dangers of gluten but the only to advocate the less-popular approach of caloric restriction as the best bet for health and longevity.