00:07:42.460cultured vegetables plus another cup of ginger and licorice root tea and at 8 30 p.m he has a
00:07:50.360homemade coconut carob blueberry goji and stevia muffin oh my god i mean so you know0.97
00:07:58.440this is the shit where i'm like i'm only growing stronger0.97
00:08:01.420it's just every weird food trend of the last decade it is literally and figuratively throw0.99
00:08:10.180a bunch of superfoods in a blender right they publish this alongside a note from a nutritionist
00:08:16.980who's just like hey man a for effort but there's no evidence about any of this also who can get
00:08:23.320emu like pretty much the whole note it's great and this nutritionist very clearly tries to be like
00:08:31.340these are good things he's doing good here yeah so clearly a reach where she's like good drinking
00:08:37.740water it doesn't need to be alkalized i love the idea of printing these like probably clearly fake
00:08:43.340celebrity food diaries with an actual like expert right next to them be like
00:08:48.880don't know about that don't alkalize it yeah fully just like here's 300 words of side eye
00:08:56.760yeah so when this came out the internet pounced there was some like tv comedy about it there's
00:09:05.260a little clip of like a morning show joking about activated almonds and like you know a bunch of
00:09:10.760people were like this guy get a load of this nonsense and that was sort of the end of it
00:09:15.040the next year pete evans goes all in on the paleo diet okay so mike i would like to ask you
00:09:24.500what you know about the paleo diet if anything i did not know we were going to talk about the
00:09:28.720paleo diet today i'm really excited about this uh oh yeah it's like eating like a caveman early
00:09:34.580humans live longer and we're healthier and so based on that we should go back to a pre-agricultural
00:09:43.000is my understanding so yep meat and vegetables but nothing that is grown or processed so like
00:09:50.800no wheat it's a lot of like nuts there's a paleo restaurant in berlin that i went to once which was
00:09:58.160actually really good and like the bread was just like a bunch of like a little tiny nuts like
00:10:03.640shoved together and like held together with raisins it's just compressed trail mix it was
00:10:10.900basically but i'm like you know what no mix wicks so i was fine with like 24 trail mix delicious
00:10:18.700so you pretty much nailed it paleo is one of the first big diets to sort of bridge the rhetoric of
00:10:29.140weight loss and of like, it's not about weight loss. It's about how you feel. It's about wellness,
00:10:34.820right? This is one of those that's like, tries to do the like, it's not anti fat. It's just
00:10:39.820ableist. So like, you pulled this out. But the idea is basically, that the way we eat today
00:10:46.840isn't how we're supposed to be eating. And that actually, we should be eating foods in the way
00:10:51.580that humans did in the paleolithic era, which is like prior to the development of agriculture.
00:10:57.300So I don't know about you, but I have known people that have been on the paleo diet over the years. I actually think that like as a diet, paleo seems like one of the more harmless ones. I feel like the actual diet itself kind of seems fine. It's just like a bunch of meat and vegetables, basically. And then it also sounds like the historical documentary factual stuff behind paleo is just complete fucking garbage.
00:15:47.480My entire goal for this series is to show you how to eat the way nature intended.
00:15:52.980In the first few million years, we, or some pre-we relative, were on this planet.
00:15:58.300We had a completely balanced symbiotic relationship with nature.
00:16:02.120We'd started off from chimps, eating mostly fruit, a little bit of meat.
00:16:06.880Moved to land, started scavenging percases from other kills, getting bone marrow, getting brains.
00:16:13.900At some point started developing tools and hunting, and then at some point started cooking.
00:16:18.800And an amazing thing happened during this three million year paleolithic period as hunter-gatherers.
00:16:24.520The vast energy we were getting from hunted meats, those amazing nutrients from the brains, the bone marrow, the organs, the muscle, the rich vitamins and minerals we were getting from the foraged fruits, nuts, seeds and vegetables fed us so completely that our brains grew bigger.
00:22:59.260That is late to be using the word eugenics, dude.
00:23:03.320At this point, eugenics boards in the US were already shutting down.1.00
00:23:07.240And he's like, bring it back, everybody.0.75
00:23:09.820not done yet that's dark it is so fucking dark i mean he's basically making like a classic0.87
00:23:17.120eugenics argument that basically right now the wrong people are breeding and as a result the0.91
00:23:23.940human race is not becoming more excellent over time as the cows are we are becoming less excellent
00:23:30.700and that's because we don't eat like cavemen i guess or something yeah i mean i think it's worth
00:23:36.260noting that this is not an exception to his politics. This is the rule of his politics. So
00:23:42.820one of my favorite books that we have discussed on this podcast is diet and the disease of
00:23:48.500civilization, which is sort of this analysis of sort of the ways in which we talk about diets as
00:23:53.900a solution to a fallen society. And the author of that book talks about how paleo diet proponents
00:24:01.840have distanced themselves from this dude because he was not just full-throatedly a proponent of
00:24:09.680eugenics but also pretty committed to white supremacy did you read this guy's whole terrible
00:24:15.640like white supremacist manifesto book i read like half of it and then i was like i don't think i'm
00:24:20.980getting more intellectual nutrition out of this he's he's not gonna save it in the third act
00:24:27.500I'm not like, oh, he might pull it out here in the end. Like, no. So we've sort of gotten to some
00:24:32.760of these points, but I would just lift up that there are three really key critical problems
00:24:38.100with paleo, right? One is this thing that we were just talking about, which is that it is premised
00:24:43.760on deeply ableist and often sort of eugenicist logic, right? The focus here is on this kind of
00:24:51.500magical thinking designed to convince non-disabled people that they will never get sick or become0.74
00:24:56.940disabled if they just follow the right steps. Problem number two, it makes a bunch of broad0.99
00:25:03.260claims about health outcomes, and those outcomes are largely unproven. The headline here, I would
00:25:09.800say, is that the paleo diet is pretty debated in the literature for a lot of the same reasons
00:25:14.340the keto diet is, which is that quite a few proponents make a bunch of very bold claims
00:25:20.540about the diet's ability to cure or prevent or treat different health issues, right? And quite
00:25:27.160a few opponents say there isn't really sufficient evidence to draw those conclusions. So the biggest
00:25:32.500meta-analysis I found of the paleo diet was a meta-analysis of four randomized control trials
00:25:38.200that covered 159 participants. Oh, wow. Okay. Those are small. And also probably like six
00:25:45.520week long studies or something like that. These RCTs for diets are always super short. Yeah.
00:25:49.980Yeah. So like, I would say, generally speaking, like cards on the table, I'm generally with the
00:25:56.100opponents, the research that exists that sort of trumpets these glowing findings in its executive
00:26:02.220summaries. The actual numbers just don't back it up, right? They show nominal changes in waist
00:26:08.060circumference and blood glucose and HDL cholesterol, stuff like that. But nothing earth shattering,
00:26:14.360right? There's no evidence for the claims, like the claim that they're making is that like,
00:26:17.880this is the superior diet for humans. Absolutely. This is always the big break that it's just like,
00:26:23.540okay, we've cracked it. Like we've cracked the code. We know exactly how all humans should be
00:26:27.280eating. And then you look at the literature and it's like, waist circumference was two centimeters
00:26:30.740smaller. So there is a great paper that was published in the American Journal of Clinical
00:26:39.680Nutrition, where a couple of researchers really take on a bunch of the health claims being made
00:26:45.640about paleo on the heels of a study being published sort of trumpeting the promise of
00:26:50.840paleo, right? They call out in this paper that there are sort of these broad claims that
00:26:56.140restricting specific food groups as you do in paleo is health promoting, but those claims
00:27:02.140haven't established the specific restrictions that they're proposing being actually health
00:27:07.920promoting, right? Like in this paper, they say, okay, so dairy is a good source of protein,
00:27:12.880calcium and phosphorus and you haven't illustrated the benefits of cutting out dairy. We know what
00:27:18.600it's good for. We don't know what it works against. You're saying that cutting out grains
00:27:23.460is really important, but grains are like a really inexpensive staple food for people around the
00:27:27.900world. And it's a way that we feed huge portions of the population. And the last one is beans are
00:27:34.020actually great sources of protein, fiber and minerals. And they are also like a huge staple
00:27:39.940food for many, many, many people around the world, you have not illustrated why it would be a health
00:27:45.740promoting behavior to restrict those foods, right? Right. They also include this killer quote in
00:27:51.520their paper, which I just sent to you. Oh, in real practice, many people including popular
00:27:57.740proponents of the paleo diet, such as online bloggers and cookbook writers are merely adapting
00:28:02.860their Western diet to align with paleo diet restrictions. For example, desserts made with
00:28:08.140paleo acceptable alternatives such as almond flour and honey instead of sugar and wheat flour.
00:28:12.800In this case, the paleo diet philosophy is extremely unlikely to change health outcomes
00:28:17.660for anybody but those with celiac disease. Essentially, they're saying like,
00:28:21.940if your muffin is made with almond flour and honey, instead of wheat and cane sugar or beet
00:28:27.900sugar or whatever kind of sugar, right, that's not necessarily going to make a massive change
00:28:32.320in your health outcomes if you are an otherwise non disabled, non chronically ill person,
00:28:37.220right because you're basically eating the same like macro nutrients or whatever in the brownie
00:28:41.840so there's nothing like there's nothing obvious about like eating honey is better for you than
00:28:46.080sugar particularly also hard to argue that like quote-unquote cavemen didn't have wheat but they
00:28:53.300definitely had bob's red mill almond flour like yeah also i got really into beekeeper youtube
00:29:00.260like in the last couple of months of like calling honey pre-agricultural it's like i guess that's
00:29:06.860technically true but when you think about what it takes for humans to gather honey before they
00:29:12.680were essentially farming honeybees it's like you're walking around the forest you're finding
00:29:17.940a hive you're risking getting stung a million times hunter-gatherer societies were probably
00:29:23.060doing that but like they weren't having honey on the scale that modern humans are having honey i'm
00:29:29.340assuming it would have been like a couple times a year or something as a treat like you're not just
00:29:33.760walking through the woods and just like scooping honey out of trees that's how yogi bear eats honey
00:29:39.640yeah like it's that's how winnie the pooh eats honey you're buying queens on ebay you're wearing
00:29:45.060the suit you know it's it's it's man-made food it's fine paleo is pre-agriculture but post ebay
00:29:53.360I don't know. I'm just like, I don't even understand the fucking distinction between0.95
00:29:59.820like agricultural and non agricultural at that point. Totally. Absolutely. And this is what0.98
00:30:03.940we're talking about, about like, when you just focus on the core idea that's being presented,
00:30:08.900it falls apart so quickly. Yeah. The other thing that sort of paleo proponents will
00:30:14.840sort of insist upon is that because this diet existed before agriculture, as we know it now,
00:30:23.360it must be healthier, which then means that people who existed before agriculture as we know it now
00:30:30.080must also have been healthier too, right? No. Yeah. As you have noted, the data on like
00:30:36.300paleolithic humans is really tricky to come by because you can't just ask one. But I will say
00:30:42.520that the Lancet published a study of mummies and found that 47 of the 137 mummies they looked at
00:30:53.240had hardened arteries yes but what was their bmi aubry michael michael to know if they were healthy
00:31:00.980i need to know if they were thin were they thin so thin they became human their bodies equalized
00:31:06.360their natural beautiful proportions so anyway i mean like again like not a huge amount of data
00:31:12.400hard to do a randomized controlled trial on like a population that is long since dead and gone
00:31:17.340But 47 out of 137 having hardened arteries is not exactly the like stellar endorsement of paleo that paleo proponents might hope for.
00:31:29.420But that's the thing with these, like, hearkening back to previous times thing is there's something about, like, reconstructing this imagined past where we were all just more pure in this, like, kind of inchoate, never quite defined way.
00:31:45.060They're drawing on these kind of, like, I guess, assumptions that we've all made in our heads of, like, well, what were, like, caveman lives like?
00:31:52.080But, like, none of us are basing that on any real information.
00:31:55.400like most members of the public do not have a firm grasp on that period of history. They're
00:32:01.620just inviting you to envision a fake past. And then they're using that fake past as evidence
00:32:10.160for how you should structure your life now. I mean, I think it's like a lot of the political
00:32:15.040rhetoric of the right, which is like, we need to get back to this time. Totally. But like,
00:32:19.480we are extremely susceptible, broadly speaking, to this idea of nostalgia. And it also feels like
00:32:25.820it is no accident that the main proponents of this diet are white dudes who are like,0.85
00:32:32.060going back in the past seems like a good thing to do. So the third and final problem with paleo0.71
00:32:38.360that I would say is that the premise is just wrong. Do we get to talk about early man now?
00:32:43.300we sure do so excited first things first the planet was then as it is now extremely biodiverse
00:32:51.040right so if you try to imagine making a statement now that is like here's how people in the world
00:32:58.500eat today right is there anything that we could say for sure that had any real meaning right
00:33:03.580right it just doesn't hold water on its face that someone in a desert and someone yeah in a
00:33:09.740rainforest would be eating the same way for a two million year span right proto-humans were eating
00:33:17.720like carcasses off the ground like there's a big debate about whether humans were actually
00:33:23.220hunter-gatherers or like scavengers yeah and so there's also it's like well if we really want to0.98
00:33:28.180harken back to it then like you should be eating fucking squirrels from the side of the highway0.90
00:33:32.140totally but of course they're not doing that because this whole thing is aesthetic right and0.88
00:33:35.840also like I did find some work done by two professors who compiled a bunch of data on the
00:33:42.860diversity of plant life in the Paleolithic era based on sort of like all of the information we've
00:33:48.120got. What they found was that Paleolithic humans had, quote, extraordinarily broad tastes. Right.
00:33:55.540Folks were eating nuts, fruits, seeds, stems, roots, maybe not very much meat at all. Right.
00:34:03.380One of the professors who did that research actually was quoted as saying, quote,
00:34:08.440the modern human diet is clearly restricted when compared to the early hominin diet or
00:51:37.320And I would like to propose that we do a part two that is when the beat drops and just get into all of the absolutely bonkers Skrillex fucking turns that this story is about to take.0.77
00:51:56.640I mean, I don't know if I can, like, handle it because due to all the fluoride I've been drinking, my cognitive faculties aren't what they used to be.