Is the Paleo Diet moral?

Last updated on: August 27, 2015 at 8:15 am by Jane the Actuary

Is the Paleo Diet moral? 2015-08-27T08:15:04-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Substitute Atkins, or South Beach, or Taubes, or any similar diet that promotes meat-eating, okays fruit and vegetables to varying extents, and limits carbohydrates, from grains, anyway.

Do these diets work?

I read Taubes’ Why We Get Fat a couple years ago, and found the notion that, so long as you severely limit carbs, you’ll automatically lose excess weight and, once you arrive at your ideal weight, effortlessly maintain that weight, hard to swallow. How, after all, in this “eat all you want” diet, does your body “know” when the weight-loss regimen is over? And what happens to all the extra, unneeded calories, that Taubes says will not cause weight gain so long as they’re fat or protein, not carbs? Does the food, well, just not get digested?

The Paleo Diet (per the original book by Loren Cordain, as checked out from the library) distinguishes itself by saying, eat lean meat, not fatty meat, and unlimited carbs, so long as those come from fruit and vegetables, but it bans dairy and completely bans all grains.

The South Beach Diet likewise encourages lean meat, and distinguishes itself from Atkins & Taubes by criticizing those diets’ acceptance of high-fat foods; it also allows whole grains in its Phase II, just not processed, white grains, and pulls in the Glycemic Index to evaluate good carbs vs. bad carbs. Full disclosure: I’m at the tail end of the two-week Phase I, in which I’m not following the meal plans so much as the general concept: scrambled eggs with sausage and cheese for breakfast, salad with chicken for lunch, and meat & veggies (or more salad) for dinner.

Why this diet? Why now? Especially since somewhat over a year ago, I touted “Jane’s Weight Loss Secrets” and announced that they key was simple: stop between-meals snacking and start exercising more consistently. I had, after all, lost 5 of my excess 10 pounds, and was quite confident I was on my way to losing the other five. Trouble was, the following summer, I gained back the lost 5, and by the time we returned from our mid-August vacation, I had gained a further 5 pounds. (Yes, weight gain happens during the summer, when we go with the kids to get ice cream or donuts, and the calories expended by biking or walking there are only a fraction of the calories consumed.)

Even so, I was planning on simply resuming the “no snack” rule but flipped through the copy of the South Beach Diet that I had picked up on a lark at the thrift store. Partly I was lured by its promise of fast results, but it also had warnings about: (a) after-40 weight gain, (b) family history of diabetes — even if it’s your dad, diagnosed in his late 60s, and he was always overweight anyway — and (c) weight gain at the midsection. And I thought, “hmmm, I had gestational diabetes with my last pregnancy at age 38; maybe I’m more at risk than I like to think, and maybe my days of eating big bowls of noodles with butter should be over*, every bit as much as big bowls of ice cream.” (*I was a big Ramen noodle-eater in college — it was one of my favorite late-night snacks.)

Now, so far, in the past week and a half, I’ve lost 6 pounds (morning edit: 5 pounds). Is it “real” weight? Is it just water? Dunno. The front cover says “lose the belly fat first!” but my clothes don’t feel especially looser at the waist. After the two-week period is up, you’re supposed to resume eating carbs, but gradually, and the right kind only, and the two-week virtually-no-carb period is supposed to help your metabolism and decrease your cravings and something something insulin, the last of which caught my attention.

My experience the last 1.5 weeks has been that, whatever the impact of protein vs. carbs is, I have at any rate simply been eating less, both because I’m simply not as hungry for snacks and there aren’t many appealing snacks when you take away crackers and chips and even fruit (for the Phase I), and are supposed to content yourself with cheese in some form, and I’m not a big cheese eater. And I think my forgone starchy side dish isn’t being replaced calorie-for-calorie with veggies and meat.

So that’s my personal experience. Will I last the full two weeks? The meals are getting monotonous. Will I, afterwards, find some good long-term eating habits? Will the kids revolt against wheat pasta?

I also can believe that individual overweight people stand a good chance of losing weight with these sorts of diets — though whether it’s because of the magic of protein as a all-you-can-eat food, or whether because protein-heavy meals don’t cause blood sugar issues and leave one satisfied for longer than the equivalent number of calories in carbs, I don’t know, but even if it’s the latter, that’s a positive. And in the long term: well, there are plenty of reasons why people fail at dieting, or, just as often, lose the weight and the regain it, over and over. Partly it’s habit, partly it’s the lure of a double-chocolate doughnut, but others who have lost weight report that when they limit themselves to even a “maintenance-level” calorie limit, they feel hungry all the time. Now, periodically there are controlled studies, using identical calorie counts with varying levels of carbs, protein, and fat, that seem to prove the “calories in, calories out” approach, but that doesn’t address the difficulty or ease of following such a diet.

As to the degree to which Paleo provides optimal lifetime nutrition, or a “normal” diet leads to all manner of nutritional deficiencies, I don’t know.

But what do I mean by moral? (Besides giving me something to talk about besides the current news cycle.)

The cultivation of grains is what enabled man to become civilized. Literally — only grains had the sort of yields that made it possible for cities to form, their people fed primarily by grains — wheat, rice, corn, etc.

On an individual level, to live, in the year 2015, eating meats and vegetables, but no grains, is an expensive proposition. You can’t do this on food stamps. The Paleo Diet recommendations are even more costly: range-fed beef, free-range chicken, special-order game meat, wild-caught fish, etc. And the basic “thrifty” protein source of legumes? That’s completely ruled out on Paleo (though OK on South Beach, and I don’t know about the others). Besides which, if a large portion of the U.S. switched to a heavier emphasis on meat, and producers shifted to producing more meat, then I would expect that this would raise food costs, in general, for everyone.

What’s more, we’re all being encouraged to eat more meatless meals for the sake of the environment. Plus, the other day, Ann Althouse linked to a piece in the Washington Post which clickbaitily says that lettuce is an environmentally-incorrect vegetable because it’s mostly water in content and takes a lot of resources to grow and transport relative to the nutrition it provides. The same could likely be said for a vegetable-heavy diet in general, particularly given the fact that many of our vegetables are trucked in from California (though I don’t see any commentary in the book on the fresh vs. frozen debate).

And remember the statement that floats around to the effect that there is more than enough food to feed to world, it’s just that unjust regimes allow their people to starve? Imagine that the world adopts Paleo eating. Bye, bye, amber waves of grain. The Paleo Diet is a rich person’s, and a rich country’s, diet. There is a considerable amount of obesity in Latin America — but should Mexicans adopt Paleo eating? There is not enough food to feed the world, if we remove grains from the world’s diet.

And: what we eat is not simply a matter of personal choices. There are all manner of policy implications, as anyone who’s ever griped about Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move and the school lunch program can attest to. And if the policy implication is “rich people maintain their health with Paleo, poor folks are out of luck”, well, that is indeed a moral issue.

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