I tend to take any article I read with the word “bullshit” in it with a grain of salt.

I think this should be common sense, however I still can’t help but feel a tad bit pissed off due to an article posted on Gizmodo today. I refuse to link it here, to keep its SEO ranking down, but I still recommend you read it. The article in question is entitled “The Paleo Diet is bullshit: Cavemen actually ate lots of carbs”, and uses specious reasoning and cherry-picked studies to make its claim. Oh, and loads of SENSATIONALISM!!!

But first, a little background on me. When I was around 21 or 22, I started lifting weights, because I was a skinny little wimp with little strength at all. After a while, I started to gain muscle, increase strength, and… gain a beer gut. Of course, the Freshman 15 happens to most everyone, but my diet was especially bad, consisting mostly of Taco Bell, pizza and TV dinners. Oh, and beer, but I still drink that, albeit in smaller quantities. My eating habits were also getting in the way of my gains at the gym – I would plateau easily, never being able to increase the weight, which to me was every bit as exciting as getting a high score on Galaga. And seriously, Galaga’s awesome, so I resolved to A. fix my diet so as to reach my fitness goals, and B. play more Galaga.

I tried everything. I went low-fat* for three months, and felt like death. I went vegetarian for one month, and felt like death, and missed bacon terribly. I did South Beach for a few weeks, felt all kinds of sexy because of it, but eventually abandoned it, because complicated. In between all of these, I tried counting calories, eating a surplus to “bulk” and a deficit to “cut”, which wasn’t fun.

All of the science in each of these diets didn’t make sense; South Beach was the only one that came close. It wasn’t until, by accident, I stumbled upon Steve Kamb’s epically awesome site, Nerd Fitness, which highly promoted a way of eating that made perfect sense. He referred to it as, the Paleo Diet**.

I have stayed around 80-90% paleo for over two years now, and I’m in the best shape of my life. Perhaps that makes me one of the “faux-hippie fitness addicts” the Gizmodo article is deriding with their article. All I know is the science behind it makes sense to me, I’m making gains in the gym, I feel great, and I have never once had to starve myself.

But try telling that to Gizmodo, whose article (and the article they link to) berates people who subscribe to this lifestyle. They say that, because a certain tribe of cavemen ate acorns, which are high in carbohydrates, it completely debunks the paleo diet.

Wait, what?

That makes absolutely no sense to me. My eating habits are dictated by my own biology, perfected over millions of years of evolution. I do not claim to eat exactly what my ancestors ate; quite the contrary, I feel like what we have now is much better and more nutritious than what cavemen, cavewomen and cavechildren had available to them. What I eat is instead based on the concept that I evolved to eat hunted meat and gathered vegetables. I’m sure cavemen occasionally ate additional things – I mean, SOMEBODY had to be the first person to realize that mushrooms that grow on cowpies get you high – but the majority of our diet consisted of unprocessed meat and plant matter. While the debate rages as to whether or not that plant matter included tubers like potatoes or any dairy post-infanthood, we have used science to realize that grains and many other non-paleo food sources contain gluten, lectins and phytates, the two latter of which are toxins that evolved specifically to keep certain animals from eating them.

This is a phenomenon seen all throughout nature. Turkeys contain tryptophan to tire out predators so they only eat one or two, not the entire flock, or gaggle, or gobble, or whatever the collective noun for turkeys is. Hot peppers are hot so that only birds will eat them, as they cannot taste spiciness and will poop out the seeds all over creation. The problem isn’t the carbohydrates, but the fact that we shouldn’t be eating grains in the first place!

And yet, we ignore the warning signs associated with eating grains (which, of course, must be processed before we can even consume them), such as stomach issues, rapid weight gain, high blood pressure, and inflammation, because we merely see these as part of the natural aging process at this point.

The issue I have with opponents of the paleo diet is the fact that they A. focus almost exclusively on weight loss, not on overall health, and 2. automatically assume paleo is always low-carb. Yes, cutting carbs will make you lose fat, and a paleo diet is lower in carbs than the normal way the majority of people eat these days, but paleo is more focused on health and athletic ability, which is something you needed in order to eat and not get eaten whilst we were cave dwellers. I could very easily consume a decent amount of carbohydrates through fruit and tubers, and I do. I also consume MUCH more saturated fat than is recommended by the government (because THEY always have the best advice…), and my blood pressure and body fat are at optimal levels.

So maybe some cavemen ate acorns, and it rotted their teeth. Maybe food today is nothing like food was hundreds of thousands of years ago. All I know is that I’m fueling up as similarly as I can to what my ancestors ate as they evolved into the epically awesome powerhouse that is the human body. I am avoiding the things that I know will make me feel sick, uneasy, pukey, bloated, or make it hard to poop. Bottom line – if dinosaurs somehow came back to life, would I be well-suited to fight them off? Paleo diet. It works.
*Everybody says you need heart-healthy whole grains and to lower your cholesterol and American Heart Association and Cheerios and saturated fat clogs your arteries and high fiber and BUY OUR PRODUCT!!!

**When I say “diet” when referring to eating paleo, I mean it in the sense of your normal eating habits, NOT as a temporary band-aid for being overweight.