I’m an Omnivore

If you go check out my diet page you might notice that I’m going back on grains. In fact, I’ll be back on dairy in a month. My descent into the Paleo diet is going to have to be put on hold for a short while. Before I get too involved, I want to answer a very important question:

What really causes acne?

Is it poor hygiene? Not getting enough sunlight? Touching your face too much? As you can probably guess, I think the real reason behind most acne problems is diet.

I’ve got a damn good hunch that diet is the real issue for most cases of acne. Certain experiences have made me feel this way: for instance, my face was very clear during one week. I didn’t have so much as one pimple. I broke down one night during that week and bought a small box of Junior Mints. Within hours, I had several zits. It was ridiculous. In general, I have seen a significant improvement in my acne since I started changing my diet. However, this could be attributed to other reasons and I haven’t documented this change yet, so I am now planning to go back and see the difference.

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Many people that get introduced to the Paleo diet dismiss it immediately as nonsense. They attempt to find quick ways to disregard the entire idea, so they can go on believing that their diet is just fine.

Understanding Evolution
One of the primary reasons that the Paleo diet hasn’t become more popular is because of people underestimating, misunderstanding, or completely rejecting the theory of evolution. Unfortunately, the latter case appears to be very prevalent here in America (where we also enjoy the highest obesity rate in the world):

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For the month of September, I have decided to study the benefits and feasibility of completely eliminating grains from my diet. What does this include? Bread, pasta, rice, cereal, oatmeal, and beer, among other things. I can already imagine my readers closing their browsers, grabbing their car keys, and heading straight to the closest bagel shop.

I know, going grain free sounds crazy. My fiancee thinks it’s crazy. My friends think it’s crazy. And I don’t deny it’s somewhat difficult either. Certainly, it is more difficult than just cutting out dairy as I have previously done.

However, giving up grains is an inevitable part of exploring a Paleolithic diet and that’s exactly what I am going to do.

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I can’t believe I didn’t catch this earlier, but it appears the first controlled study of a Paleolithic diet was conducted recently in Lund, Sweden. Several researchers have compared traditional diets that are similar to the Paleolithic diet in nature in the past, but never has a controlled study been performed.

The main conclusion of the study was that a paleolithic diet controls symptoms of Type 2 Diabetes better than a traditional Mediterranean diet. :

The main result was that the blood sugar rise in response to carbohydrate intake was markedly lower after 12 weeks in the Paleolithic group (–26%), while it barely changed in the Mediterranean group (–7%). At the end of the study, all patients in the Paleolithic group had normal blood glucose.

The improved glucose tolerance in the Paleolithic group was unrelated to changes in weight or waist circumference, although waist decreased slightly more in that group. Hence, the research group concludes that something more than caloric intake and weight loss was responsible for the improved handling of dietary carbohydrate. The main difference between the groups was a much lower intake of grains and dairy products and a higher fruit intake in the Paleolithic group. Substances in grains and dairy products have been shown to interfere with the metabolism of carbohydrates and fat in various studies.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070627225459.htm

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One of my readers recommended the blog of Art De Vany. Art is a Professor of Economics at UCI and he has been following the guidelines of what he calls ‘evolutionary fitness’ for twenty years. It seems that it’s working out quite well for him. He is writing a book about the topic: the first chapter on Art’s book Evolutionary Fitness.

Art also has some theories on the dangers of endurance training that I’m not really sure I agree with, but they are intriguing. I’m definitely open to new ideas. He writes about a good deal of other topics as well.

Anyways, Art sums up a lot of the ideas concerning an evolutionary diet elegantly, so he probably explains it much better than I can:

It begins with the premise that our bodies and minds are adapted to an ancient environment that passed more than 10,000 years ago. We evolved as hunter-gatherers over at least three million years and that lifeway shapes our attributes, behaviors, and capabilities as human beings. It is by understanding the hunter-gatherer adaptation and incorporating the activity and eating patterns of our ancestral lifeway with the findings of the best of modern science that we can live a natural and healthy life in a modern world that is very different from the one in which human beings evolved.

For the past three weeks, I’ve tried the best I could to eliminate dairy from my diet. And what do you know, I didn’t die! But I didn’t completely succeed at cutting everything out. I would say I got rid of the large majority of it, but I did run into a few snags.

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Some people might think you’re crazy for coming up with your own diet. Let them think that while they mindlessly scarf down the same food they’ve been eating for years. Now, please don’t go on a diet that is nutrient deficient. That would be just stupid. Otherwise, I don’t see the problem. You’ve already been including and excluding foods. You just probably haven’t done it with much thought.

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Welcome to Part II! Last time, I talked about why you should be consciously creating a healthy diet for yourself. This post discusses the actual formation of that diet.

Heuristics
Ok, I was a jerk and used an obscure term I love from computer science. Heuristics are simply rules you use to make judgments. You could call them rules of thumb. We need a way to select foods and we can use heuristics to guide us. They may not work in all cases, but they are simple and easy to follow. The food pyramid is a good example. This is the old food pyramid created by the USDA:

It splits up foods into “groups” and then gives you a rough estimate of how much you should eat from each group everyday. It works, but it has some issues. I’m sure you can point some obvious problems with this pyramid. There was a new pyramid released by the USDA in 2005. Now think about that for a moment. Up until just two years ago, according to the US government, it was perfectly acceptable to get 11 servings from the bread, cereal, rice, and pasta group in a day. I don’t think this sat too well with low carb dieters. Low carb diets are another example of a heuristic: low carbohydrates, high protein. I like heuristics because they are simple.

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