Paleo Diet

(May 25, 2011)

I tried writing this essay about a month ago, but ended up veering off into some strange territory, accentuated by a massive clothing donation to Goodwill, an excursion into minimalist philosophy, and—ten paragraphs later—finally mentioning Primal/Paleo. This wasn’t the only false start either: I appear to have put off these kinds of introspective pursuits in favor of hedonistic or practical pursuits, and it seems that guitar, windsurfing, and involvement with the local food community have been filling the same gaps that, say, sitting down and blasting out a blog post used to occupy.

However, now I find myself sitting in a Firestone waiting for my car wheels to get balanced, so let this be my opportunity to finally get some thoughts about my Paleo-anniversary out.

I’ve been Paleo for over a year now in name, but I must admit that a lot of this year has been bumbling and experimenting; in fact, for the first months that I started a Paleo diet, it was probably akin to a Faileo diet (see this post by Melissa McEwen of Hunt.Gather.Love). That’s not to say that it was a complete waste of time—despite not being truly Paleo, Faileo is still a big step in the right direction on the “real food” continuum. As such, my last rave about Paleo reflects an intuitive, albeit superficial understanding of the new world I’ve adopted.

Since then, I’ve done a tremendous amount of reading, learning, and debating to end up where I am now. Although when I say it like that, it makes it seem like I’ve “found the sweet spot” or something, but that’s actually probably not true. You see, unlike many other food communities, the Paleo community is all about learning, admitting mistakes, and adjusting. Accordingly, I’m sure I will continue to refine my approach as I continue to learn more about food and my body.

So let me take a moment to define what my version of Paleo currently looks like. Or actually, let me explain first why I can even say “my version of Paleo,” since a lot of people seem to overlook this point: one of my big realizations this year has been that there is no The Paleo Diet. This unfortunate misconception has not been helped by books adopting titles such as “The Paleo Diet,” or “The Paleo Solution,” or “The Primal Blueprint.” This is not an attack against the authors of said books, since they have all proven to be excellent resources—I’m just pointing out the subliminal effects of the book titles. The sum of all this is that it accidentally portrays eating Paleo as following some prescriptive diet, when in fact it’s really a diet framework from which you derive a diet that is satisfactory for you, which is how I now think of it.

The way I’ve started to describe Paleo these days is something akin to “a whole, unprocessed, real foods diet that excludes things known to cause disease and problems in humans, such as grains, dairy, legumes, and foods/ingredients that had to go through a factory.” I also like to emphasize immediately afterwards that this framework is not dogmatic—it is up to each individual to weigh the evidence against these foods against the evidence or emotional preference for these foods. For instance, a lot of paleo folks eat dairy, and some even eat white rice. It’s not about depriving yourself in the name of “eating right.” In the long run, the stress from constantly fighting your simplest desires is probably worse for you than just eating a little of that food here and there. Personally, being strict and disciplined is actually a source of pride and contentment (yeah… you know me), so I literally get more joy from staying 100% Paleo than “cheating”; consequently, it makes sense for me to never “cheat,” whereas for others it does. It’s really no big deal either way since you’re just trying to achieve a livable lifestyle that you can identify with for the rest of your life. I’m certainly not going to judge you, even though I appear to most folks as being “really intense” about Paleo. The thing is, people who know me know that I’m really intense about everything, so I’m really just being consistent here.

With that redefinition out of the way, I should also mention that I’ve really taken to the ethics of Paleo, which is probably a more specialized concern relative to the community at large. Incidentally, Paleo ethics have arguably become more important to me than the nutritional aspects; however, I don’t mean to introduce a false dichotomy here, because the ethics of Paleo (i.e. nature’s way) tends to produce the optimal result anyway. So what does that mean practically? Well, over the past few months, I’ve sourced all my meat from local (within Texas) farmers that raise their animals humanely, to the point of opting out of industry meat completely. Given that such a large portion of my diet is animal-based, this particular insistence on local pastured meats has put me a long way towards my goal of opting out of the industrial food grid as a whole. Given that this is one of my goals, it really ticks me off when certain people (you know who you are) give me dirty looks because I eat a lot of meat. News flash: eating meat and endorsing the industrial death machine is not the same thing.

Speaking of industrial death machine, this takes me to a second point, which is that there is no consistent ethics today in which eating grains makes sense. Even if we were to ignore the nutritional problems of grains, the ethics of the current situation are pretty glaring, and represent a real monkey-wrench in any moral/ethics system that claims to be righteous. Simply put, grain agriculture is inherently not sustainable, nor morally justifiable. I don’t just mean that in the context of our disastrous food politics and petroleum-based agriculture—I mean that in the natural mechanics sense. Think about what agriculture really is: it’s man declaring that a particular ecosystem is unfit for his needs, and then proceeding to eradicate the life he deems to be unfit and replacing it with some pet species. He then destroys river systems to feed his thirsty fields, ruining countless other ecosystems. Combine that with an insatiable thirst for petroleum (dead animals) and pesticides (more dead animals) in today’s industrial grain agriculture, then suddenly Mr. Wheatie is Osama Bin Laden. Except Mr. Wheatie is still alive and killing. You don’t see the blood on your cupcake, but I see the blood on my roast.

Ultimately, I can’t do this topic justice in this one paragraph, so I encourage you to get in touch with me if you are baffled by my claims. I have yet to meet anyone who has successfully argued for industrial grain agriculture and the status quo, and would love to hear intelligent points from another perspective. Additionally, I would like to give credit to Lierre Keith’s book “The Vegetarian Myth” for synthesizing so eloquently the murky ideas I originally had about grains, and making the argument so persuasively against industrial agriculture. Just to be crystal clear: neither the grain industry nor meat industry are forgivable; however, I can show you easily accessible, sustainably raised, ethical pastured meat that is not part of that industry. Can you show me the same for grains?

But that’s enough diatribe for now—I get really passionate when I talk about the ethics in particular. Instead, let me tell you more about some specific concepts that I think are the key to my current primal lifestyle: hormesis, randomness, and acuity.

1. Hormesis is a fancy name for a familiar concept: “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” It basically says that the beneficial effects of something wear off as the dose increases, and in some cases becoming dangerous (but not necessarily so). (For the pedants out there, this is not technically accurate, but this definition will suffice for the topic at hand).
2. Randomness is obvious, but implementing it can be hard. Humans are not inherently random, so it helps to have a natural source of randomness.
3. Acuity is all about short bursts of intensity: lengthy droning is bad, sharp but short bursts are good. It’s actually not a stretch to say that hormesis and acuity are intimately related.

Using these three concepts, I’m going to show how I use them as a guideline to figure out my response to some seemingly unrelated topics that the Paleo community has been debating about recently:

• Some people are very concerned about macronutrient ratios (the caloric ratio of your carb, protein, and fat intake), and this has manifested itself in the Paleosphere recently as the low-carb/not-low-carb debate. To me, this debate is kind of misguided, because hormesis, randomness, and acuity tell me that the preferred thing to do here is to generally moderate intake of all the macros, and randomly eat too much or too little (spike up and down on the nutrients randomly). This can manifest itself as eating super high carb one day and no-carb another (similarly for proteins and fats), or simply under-eating (fasting) or over-eating (feasting) on all nutrients on others. I like to just listen to my body and not force the issue. If I miss a meal once in a while, then I miss a meal once in a while; if I just downed two whole sweet potatoes in one sitting, then I just downed two whole sweet potatoes in one sitting! I’ve also eaten an entire pineapple in one sitting! No problems, all joy!
• There’s also the cardio vs HIIT debate, but I think the community has in general settled against chronic cardio (not necessarily cardio itself) because of the droning stress it imposes on the body. But to me, this consensus is again an application of the three concepts: generally keep things HIIT (because it’s hormetic), but randomly do some crazy cardio once in a long while. Note that this makes it acute cardio, not chronic cardio. This is generally how I structure my training as well. I’ve dropped my gym days from five a week to one or two of heavy/intense/composite lifting, with the other days reserved for windsurfing, which may take the form of highly intense sailing, dynamic freestyle stuff, or cardio-like pumping in light winds. Wind is generally random for practical purposes, so it keeps me from getting into a routine.
• I think in general people in the Paleosphere are chilling out on the supplements, which I feel is a natural response to realizing that your diet is actually supplying a pretty complete range of nutrients. Additionally, it’s also reasonable to expect that you’ll heal and replenish after you’ve been Paleo for a while, so that your need for supplements diminishes over time. I’ve personally gone supplement-free with the exception of trace minerals added to my water, because I don’t see any way to get good mineralized water that is sustainable, and because our soil is so depleted that the tubers and few vegetables I do get around to eating are suboptimal in their mineral profile. I used to take a lot of stuff, like fish oil (now moot because my omega-3’s are in balance and I keep them in balance by eating quality meats and occasional seafood), Vitamin D (I’ll take this next winter for sure if I can’t enough sun, but for now I’m darker than my wood furniture from the sun alone), Vitamin C (getting a decent amount from sweet potatoes), protein supplement (I now avoid this stuff like the plague because of soy and milk ingredients, but also because my diet provides quality unprocessed protein), antioxidants (no need because my systemic inflammation is super low). And let’s not forget the skin stuff like cleansers, moisturizers, shampoos, conditioners or whatever—all that skin and hair stuff is no longer needed. How liberating!
  
  Ok, so how does this have anything to do with hormesis, randomness, and acuity? Well to me, if you’re eating a varied Paleo diet, your nutrient intake is already pretty hormetic: you’re getting a good range of things, but you’re not overdosing on anything in particular (unless you’re eating polar bear liver! Rookie mistake!). But I think randomness should play a part here too, in the sense that if you go a week or two without eating anything green, that’s totally ok. You’ll probably really crave green things after that. Similarly with fish, if you go for a while without it, then it’s no big deal. When salmon season rolls around, you’ll probably eat it every day. Some weeks you’ll get a lot of organ meats, other weeks you won’t. Some days you’ll go with very little meat or none at all—again, no big deal! Some days you’ll eat something purple, other days you’ll eat something yellow, and other days yet you’ll eat something red. With this definition of randomness, you can also see how you’re getting occasional spikes of certain nutrients. I won’t make any claims about the optimality in this case, but I do think the body has evolved to cope well with this kind of intermittency, if not being optimized by it.

Alright, well this expose is getting to be quite long, and I didn’t even get to talk about some of the crazier-sounding stuff I’ve started to do this past year (crazy in the sense that it goes against Conventional Wisdom). We’re talking no soap, no shampoo, cold showers, basically no fruits or nuts, a penchant for barefooting, lobbying on the State Capitol… But maybe it’s actually a good time to call it quits, while you still think that I haven’t completely gone off the deep end. For my wonderful readers out there, I promise to write more about all this stuff in the future. You see, Paleo is something I live and think about 24/7, so trying to write an epic one-year anniversary essay was probably an ill-fated endeavor to begin with.

Thanks for reading! Remember that there are few things more satisfying than being able to express your genetic potential to its fullest!