Welcome to Science Versus, the show where we pick Fact Against Fat, I'm Wendy Zogamin, and today we're dissecting the Paleo diet. Researchers have been celebrating a breakthrough and we could discover- Seems to break through. We're covering the season. The brightest across the world.
Well, first. This is the idea that if you eat like our ancestors did in Paleolithic times, you can lose weight, stay off illness and live at the peak of health. The followers say they are shedding drastic amounts of weight and awarding off debilitating diseases. The caveman diet is the most googled diet on the planet.
We need to eat the way nature intended us to eat. The Paleo diet is described by some as a fad, a marketing ploy, and- It's not for a different paradigm from what is considered the norm, so it's going to get shot down a little bit. Amidst the cave madness, we're about to find out if this diet is healthy and whether we should all be on it. But first, what even is the Paleo diet?
Well, the original prescription by Dr. Long-Cordain, who wrote the Paleo diet, said that our diet should consist of lemutes, fish, and green nuts, berries. That's Darryl Edwards. He's a Paleo advocate and author of the book, Paleo Fitness.
And we should astute processed foods, unnecessary sugar and sweetness, avoid anti-nutrients. Anti-nutrients. We'll get to those a little later. Now also, Paleo fans completely cut out dairy because Paleo people didn't have cows.
I don't eat any dairy at all. And also, no legumes. So this means no cheese, no chickpeas, no palapine for you, none of that. And that's all fine.
But then, there's science. Visually, the Paleo-lythic period begins around 2.5 million years ago. No, T-Rex was dead long before this. OK, it goes until around 10,000 years ago.
Really before we figured out agriculture. So what were our early ancestors eating back then? So I would assume they would have eaten quite a lot of plant foods, probably fruits, seeds. They turned increasingly to animal source foods.
This is Katherine Milton. She's a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. And when it comes to knowing what our ancestors ate, she's one of the best in the business. So I went to Brazil and over about 15 year period, I was able to work with seven different indigenous groups in the Brazilian Amazon, who had been very little, contacted by outsiders.
She's also studied non-human primates to get an idea about what our monkey cousins were eating. So what does our primatologist think of the Paleo diet? Well, the thing is, I honestly don't know what people mean when they talk about the Paleo diet because they were hundreds of different Paleo diets. Because people were eating what was around them.
So if you lived near the ocean, you'd be eating lots of fish. If you lived in the Annys mountains, you might have been eating cashews. And this means that when people say they're going Paleo, they're not eating a diet that resembles what one person living in Paleolithic times would have eaten. They're getting their apples, maybe from the Middle East, their avocados from Mexico, barramundi from Northern Australia.
I mean, this is a traveling, traveling caveman. The thing you have to understand is if someone is a hunter-gatherer, which is what our most sensibly Paleo ancestors were, that means they are eating only wild plant foods and wild animal foods. So it would be, I would think, extremely difficult for anyone, you know, with a normal genre, anything in the United States, to fancy that they were eating anything remotely similar to a, quote, any of the, quote, Paleolithic diets. But when I put this to Darryl Edwards, our Paleo advocate, he actually had a pretty convincing answer, I thought.
Did they eat broccoli 50,000 years ago? Probably not. It was probably a wild variant of the modern day broccoli plant. But we do know the classification that will mimic the Paleo lifestyle.
But, Catherine is quite adamant that any food you get today is so far removed from what cave people would have been eating, that you should really just forget this idea that you're eating Paleo at all. She even says, the Paleo diet just seemed to me to be very counter our primate heritage, very counter our digestive physiology, and unlikely to provide us with much other than the fact that staying away from processed materials is probably a very good idea. Plus the Paleo diet excludes potatoes. Do you know?
You laugh? Well, I just laugh because of the enormous amounts of potatoes that are consumed in the Andes and Highland, New Guinea and so on. I mean, they would be quite shocked if they knew they couldn't have the yam or the sweet potato or the Solonaceous potato. Other things that are no-nose grains are another one.
Well, I might well, you know what they say, take away the grains and 80% of the world's population will be gone within a few weeks. So, you know, this is kind of ludicrous really. Conclusion. This so-called Paleo diet is not Paleo-lythic.
And you know what? Even Darryl Edwards, who wrote the book Paleo Fitness, acknowledges this. Paleo, the Paleo is just a label that best describes what we're aiming for. But we don't have to go that far back.
We can go back to a few generations and realize that some of the foods that have been very recently introduced to us, and even in the last 20, 30 years, there will be a lot of foods and a lot of artificial sweetness and preservatives and the like, that we have no idea what they're or we do have a great idea as to what they're doing to our health today. So, just going back a few generations, in my opinion, would be good enough for most people. I'm not sure that you can sneak out of this so easily though, because the thrust behind this Paleo diet argues that humans take tens of thousands of years to evolve so that they can eat certain foods. And if it's okay to just go back a few generations, then that's a different philosophy, isn't it?
Which takes us to our next question. Is this so-called Paleo diet even healthy? Because while the elimination of some processed foods is a good thing, there are other foods that are excluded from this diet. Like dairy.
It's a no-no, because two million years ago, we hadn't domesticated cows yet. My calcium I get from sardines with the bones, a great source of calcium. And I also get them from leafy greens. So do you need to eat dairy to get enough calcium for healthy bones?
Well, how does a gorilla get dairy? Here's Cajun Milton again. Because wild plants have many wild plants have very high concentrations of calcium, and they're able to get all of the calcium that they require from their wild plant diets. So you might be able to keep your bones strong on a diet without dairy, if you track what you're eating.
Another potential issue with the Paleo diet is how much meat you're eating. Here's Darryl Edwards. So I'll definitely always have some animal protein on a daily basis. And in terms of the amount, it might be 100 grams of steak.
It's not excessive amounts of meat or fish. It might not be excessive, but according to the most recent guidelines from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, that's still too much meat. These days they're recommending about 65 grams of red meat per day maximum, or instead 100 grams of fish. That's about one medium-sized meatball.
And what happens if you go overboard? The strongest evidence is a relationship between red meat and increased risk of colorectal cancer. That's Jonathan Howlett. From the collaboration for evidence research and impacting public health at Curtin University in Perth.
But also links with lung and renal cancer, and potentially pancreatic cancers. Jonathan says that the potential overconsumption of meat is particularly troubling, given that the Paleo diet says you're not allowed to have processed grains, including whole wheat bread. Whole grains in particular are packaged with brand and fibre, and we know that there's evidence around preventing inflammation of small blood clots, it helps a lot of cholesterol, moves away through the digestive tract. So if you're both consuming large amounts of, say, red meat, which we know has a link to colorectal cancer, and then you're not consuming whole grains, which we know is linked to preventing colorectal cancer.
You know, what is that actually going to do? Well, apparently, increase your risk of colorectal cancer. Our final question on the Paleo diet is about these so-called anti-nutrients. Now, these are often found in plants as a defense against predators, and according to Darryl...
Avoid anti-nutrients, where possible. And this is why you shouldn't eat potatoes, legumes and wheat, because they're chock full of these anti-nutrients. He says that in the worst case, it can kill you, but more likely... You might incur some slight sickness, or you may have suffered illness over a longer period of time.
But there's no human studies that have demonstrated that well, and the founder of the Paleo movement, Dr. Lauren Cordane, even admits that on his website. Plus, anti-nutrients aren't necessarily anti-your-health. Dora Maranova, who's a professor at Curtin University in Perth and works with Jonathan Hallott, told me via email that, quote, in the scientific literature, aren't there have been calls for more than a decade to stop the use of the term anti-nutrients or change it, because of the benefits these substances have.
The term is misleading, end quote. So some of these anti-nutrients, for example, have been found to have antioxidant and anti-cancer qualities. Even in the paleo-loving world of this issue, legumes large, Chris Cressa, who's the author of Your Personal Paleo Code, for example, reckons it's OK to eat legumes. OK, so when it comes to science versus the Paleo diet, does it stack up?
Well, although the diet isn't Paleo, and it's littered with these frustrating pseudosciencey words or science words used badly, it's understandable that people are moving towards these sorts of diets, particularly when conventional medicine isn't giving them satisfying responses. So take our Paleo advocate, Daryl Edwards, for example. Now, he found the Paleo way of life because he was in really bad shape. He'd pretty much eaten chocolate bars and microwave spaghetti for a decade, and then just found he was in really poor health.
So I was an elevator-wishing heart disease, I was pre-diabetic, and the doctor's remedy for that was for me to undergo a medication programme, which is going to be for the rest of my life. So instead of going on the meds, he searched for a different lifestyle and found the Paleo diet. And now he says he's very healthy and no longer pre-diabetic. But based on the science, he probably didn't need to go Paleo.
So the message for today? Don't say you're on the Paleo diet. Sure, reduce your consumption of processed foods and excess sugars. But when it comes to science versus Paleo, it's science one.
Paleo diet. Nill. That's it for Science Verses. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, SoundCloud, or your favourite podcast app.
And next time, does race exist. Michael, you need something else. You need something special because it's a white man's world out there, and you've got to be better than them. So what I've done is I've taken these same concepts that we apply to the non-human world and apply them to humans and ask, are there races?
I'm Wendy Zugerman, clap to you next time.