Despite the many grain free recipes on this blog and my frequent admonition to eliminate refined grain based carbs from the diet and limit even properly prepared grains to a moderate level, I don’t choose to eat paleo or primal.
I especially don’t want my children to eat this way.
My reasons are pretty straightfoward when it comes to Paleo. They are more subtle with regards to Primal.Â
Paleo Diet – Misguided from the Get Go
The Paleo Diet as written by Loren Cordain can be quickly dismissed as unhealthy because it makes a number of wild claims that are completely unsupported through close examination of Traditional Societies as studied and documented by Dr. Weston A. Price in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
For starters, he says that wild animals are low in fat, but buffalo fat is more saturated than even beef fat from domesticated cattle.
He recommends canola oil as a source of omega-3 fatty acids, yet most canola oil is deodorized during manufacturing which destroys these delicate fats. It is almost always of GMO origin.
Cordain extols the virtues of lean meats but Traditional Man prized the fatty, cholesterol rich liver and other fatty cuts.
Perhaps Cordain’s most ridiculous suggestion of all is to rub flax oil on meat before cooking. Flax oil should never be cooked as it turns rancid and would be toxic and carcinogenic to consume!
His recommendation against grains and all starchy root vegetables (tubers) goes against discoveries of grains in the ashes and pottery of some of the most primitive humans and widespread use of tubers by many Traditional Societies. For example, ancient hunter-gatherers ate oats as confirmed by archaeological evidence.
Finally, his claim that primitive man did not consume salt is just plain baffling. Just because a salt shaker wasn’t on the dinner table doesn’t mean that salt was not consumed via other methods!
Ashes from salt rich marsh grasses were added to food in African tribes. Salt rich blood from hunted game was used in food preparation after being carefully collected.
In the final analysis, there isn’t a whole lot of paleo in The Paleo Diet! Â
With so many misguided recommendations in the book as a whole, embarking down the path of the Paleo Diet is clearly fraught with a clear and present danger to health!
Primal Diet – Traditional But Is It Optimal?
My reasons for not eating Primal, however, are a bit more subtle.
Folks who eat Primal typically base it on the book The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson. The diet excludes all cereal grains and recommends against all conventional dairy although raw dairy is considered acceptable. Saturated fat and natural cholesterol are rightfully embraced as health supporting. Learning how to make bone broth is advised.
The book warns against soy, transfats, phytates, lectins, processed foods, and of course sugar.
In essence, the Primal Diet does indeed recommend a way of life and eating that is in harmony with Traditional Wisdom and following this approach to eating can be a healthy choice for some.
Remember though, that only a few Traditional societies didn’t eat grains. The vast majority did! Hence, unless you are of Eskimo or Masaai heritage who ate a carnivore diet, it is best to be eating your grains.
Primal Eating Blows Out Thyroids?Â
As an example of Primal eating not being a good long term choice, let’s examine the case of the former Fitness Editor for this blog, Paula Jager CSCS, who used to eat Primal for several years. She was even featured on Mark Sisson’s website in 2011 as an example of newly minted 50 year old in amazing physical condition. Indeed, Paula eats extremely well and works out religiously. She’s gorgeous!
However, back in 2015, Paula made the decision to go back to eating traditionally prepared, gluten free grains for health reasons. I know several other women who went back to grains due to failing thyroid health after several years eating Primal or Paleo. Women beware! I have not observed a single woman do well on this type of diet for more than a few years, particularly those with children or those who are perimenopausal or menopausal.
Why is eating traditionally prepared grains ultimately a better approach than Primal?
Not All Traditional Diets Are Created Equal
In Dr. Price’s travels, he noted that some Traditional Societies were healthier and had more excellent physical form than others.
For example, during Dr. Price’s travels in Africa, he examined several five cattle keeping groups: The Maasai of Tanganyika, the Muhima of Uganda, the Chewya of Kenya, the Watusi of Ruanda, and the Neurs tribes on the western side of the Nile near the country of Sudan.
These groups were largely carnivores with their diet consisting primarily of blood, meat and milk. Fish was also eaten by some. The liver was highly priced and was consumed both raw and cooked.
Grains, fruits, and vegetables were consumed in small amounts.
These largely carnivorous tribes were very tall with even the women averaging over 6 feet in height in some tribes. All these tribes had marvelous physiques and perfectly straight, uncrowded teeth. Six tribes had no dental decay whatsoever.
On the other extreme, Dr. Price also examined largely vegetarian tribes such as the Bantu. This agricultural group’s diet consisted primarily of sweet potatoes, corn, beans, bananas, millet and sorghum. A few cattle or goats were kept for meat and milk and frogs, insects, and other small animals were also consumed.
These tribes were dominated by their carnivorous neighbors and they did suffer from low levels of dental decay – about 5-6% of all teeth.
The final African group Dr. Price researched were the Dinkas.  The Dinkas followed a truly mixed diet of whole foods without the tendency toward the extremes of the carnivorous Maasai or the agricultural Bantu.
While not as tall as the primarily carnivorous, cattle herding groups, they were physically better proportioned and had greater strength.
The Dinka diet primarily consisted of nutrient dense, properly prepared whole grains and fish.
Dr. Price’s close study of these African groups convinced him that the best Traditional Diet – one that encourages optimal physical development in children – consisted of a balance of properly prepared whole grains along with animal foods (especially fish), and not tending toward extremes in either direction.
This is surely one of the most important lessons from Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Avoiding of extremes particularly when it comes to the diet of growing children, is the best and most wise approach when their optimal development is the goal.
So while I am not against eliminating grains in the diet particularly when a temporary period of gut healing is called for (such as with the GAPS Diet), the long term optimal way of eating is a balanced one that includes grains as described and noted by Dr. Price.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
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Sources
The Paleo Diet, Thumbs Down Book Review
More Information on Maintaining a Healthy Weight
Dukan Diet
Losing Weight with Coconut Oil
Zoe Harcombe Diet
Fasting with bone broth
Raw milk fasting
Bulletproof Coffee Weight Loss Risks
Despite the benefits, there are a couple of glaring problems with the Paleo
Diet – some of which may make this diet a flop for certain people. The first problem with
Paleo is the fact that the overwhelming majority of its health claims are exaggerated,
unproven, or downright made up. While it certainly appeals to a kind of logic where
getting back to a simpler time is held in higher regard than progress, the truth is our
Paleolithic ancestors weren’t much healthier than we are today.
These days are some beneficial systems that fix weight issues.
While I do feel the Paleo diet and the Primal diet were a bit misrepresented here, I too agree that too extreme in one direction or another is not healthy. While I do believe that one can still be very healthy without grains, in some of us there is a much bigger need for carbs than others. Of course there are turnips, potatoes, beets, rutabaga, pumpkin and all kinds of squash, bananas, plantain and other fruits that are good carbs. But there literally are those people who need big, hearty amounts of carbs! The Scottish were of some of the very healthy traditional eaters, yet they ate quite a bit of oats. These oats were ancient quality, sun dried and stone ground. Can you even get that quality today? Then the oats were soaked and sometimes soured before prep and eating, and the Scottish did very well with them in their diet. I think the most important thing to do is 1) do what works best for your body and 2) eat what your ancient ancestors ate (or those nearest in geography to your ancestors that were of strong health.) For example, my ancestors come from France, Canada, England, Scotland and America (American Indian) so I would not eat the traditional diets of the Mexicans or African’s. It’s best to eat of what your land provides. I live very north, so we do not get much sun out of the year. But I live on the Great Lakes, and this it makes sense that i should eat lots of fish and fish oils so that my D levels are adequate where as I do not get enough from the sun.
Attention all: Paleo Huntress does NOT represent a paleo lifestyle. She represents hatred and bullying. MANY of her previous posts through the years have now been deleted, including an entire thread where she was accused of having several aliases and then PROVEN to have done by the moderator, who checked ISP addresses. I encourage the moderator here to do the same. She has no interest in real communication, only “winning” some imaginary fight and having the last word. Apparently life is pretty dull in Worcester, MA and Laurie has little to do but pick fights and taunt people she is stalking… poor saps that responded to her in the misguided notion that she was human.
What is particularly humorous about this post is that she is espousing Sally Fallon… of the Westin Price Foundation, and in other threads she will post against them… it all depends on her mood. If you want to see her previous posts and see what I mean about creating aliases that support her view, you need to hurry. Since I started checking on my own forum, and posting warnings, Laurie has deleted a great many of them, just in the last couple days. We have found it best to just not feed her ego (it thrives on ANY attention), and we have found that most of the posts that do provide her attention, are actually just her. Just check the ISP… It’s all there. Have a great day REAL people and please go to real sources for lifestyle change guidance.
Here is a link to her shenanigans- just go right to the comments and enjoy a good laugh. http://nutritionfacts.org/video/changing-our-taste-buds/
I know I’m late on this bandwagon, but I wanted to throw out another book title that I think is an important read for anyone interested in nutritional science:
The Perfect Health Diet, by Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet.
http://perfecthealthdiet.com/
I am a strong skeptic, a research junkie, and a mother of two. This is hands down the best book I have read on nutrition.
It’s really hard to get through an article when you use Loren Cordain as your main source. In fact, after that, I didn’t even try, since it’s clear you didn’t do any research.
Given both how old this post is and your apparent refusal to address per previously asked questions, I don’t expect you to answer my comment, but I have a question I’m going to ask anyway. And since you’ve glossed over the specific questions in previous comments you’ve made wherein you give vague non-answers, I’ll spell it out for you:
Several people have pointed out that you repeatedly insist that young children miss out on nutrition if they are not given moderate amounts of “properly prepared” grains, without bothering to explain this. You acknowledge instances where such a totally grain-free diet is okay (celiac), but you keep saying that if there’s no digestive/health reason to do so, that children miss out on something if they don’t eat at least some amount of, again, “properly prepared” grain.
The problem is, you refuse to say what exactly it is that grains provide that is so crucial and essential. You DO admit in a comment that there is nothing in grains that cannot be found in other foods, which is precisely why people don’t understand your insistence that grains are essential if there is no health reason to exclude them. If all the nutrients and minerals and whatever else grains contain–including magnesium, which is, notably, the ONLY thing you’ve specifically named–are available in other foods, then WHY, precisely, is excluding grain from a young child’s diet such a problem? Spell it out, please, since you keep making the assertion.
FYI, pointing to sickly children whose diets 100% exclude grain and insisting that the lack of grain is de facto the reason they are not thriving is extremely fallacious. Unless you can prove that ALL young children whose diets completely exclude grain are thus not thriving, your claim is baseless, especially if you do not look for other possible causes.
Finally, while you have at least responded to (some) of the comment questions asking about your thing about young children and grains (even though you haven’t once bothered to actually answer the question), you haven’t even acknowledged the question as to why you don’t seem to see the logical disconnect in your assertion that grains are not to be eaten while a person is healing from digestive issues, or just generally recovering from sickness. It surprises me that you cannot see how the discrepancy here. What’s wrong with grains that you advocate NOT eating them during digestive issues or illness? Seriously, you cannot see why it seems strange to people?
Excellent comment. I too would like answers to these questions and feel that if you have the time to compose the blog posts, you should also be willing to take the time to address the questions and challenges it raises.
Just as an FYI, Paleo Huntress is a well-known troll who does NOT represent the Paleo lifestyle. She simply trolls sites looking for an argument and then actually creates others IDs to agree or ask question that she can then answer. Her’s is a very small world. Check it out… go right to the comments and you’ll see she was caught red-handed… this is just ONE of many. Let’s not feed the trolls, who thrive on any attention. http://nutritionfacts.org/video/changing-our-taste-buds/
This is the second time I’ve seen one of these comments in a forum I subscribe to today and when I googled the ID, I found several more. It looks like paleo huntress found herself a cyberstalker. I followed the link provided and don’t know what we’re supposed to be outraged over. People use multiple IDs online everywhere. You’re naive if you think they don’t. Multiple accounts have nothing to do with trolling.
Paleo Huntress, if you care, you can report the harassment to an agency like this one-Â http://www.fightcyberstalking.org/report-cyberstalking-case/Â
Anonymous comments still capture the poster’s IP address so he/she will be easy for law enforcement to identify.
Welp, the difference is, this “paleo huntress” person has been busted creating 3 different aliases to prove their point on the same article, and use the same aliases to harass other people who have conflicting opinions.
When you’re a troll, you can’t not expect to be trolled in return.
I agree 100%. Probably worst of all, this is the first post I’ve read from this blog and it is equivalent to empty calories. No real information, no links to research, select (and incomplete, therefore inaccurate) paraphrasing, and no substantive followup to the many criticisms and reasonable questioning of the statements in the post. This indicates to me an unacceptable level of irresponsibility in the dissemination of information to your readers and results an unfortunate degree of untrustworthiness among anyone reading with a shred of critical thinking abilities. You criticize others for making errors in their assertions but completely ignore your own. In the span of 10 minutes you both gained and lost a reader. (And I’m not even “paleo”)