More Hot Paleo Chat (sorta) - The Weston A. Price Foundation

[BamaDave]

I stumbled onto this website today: Weston A. Price Foundation

There's a bunch of articles on traditional diets at http://www.westonaprice.org/traditio...ts/index.html.

So far, I have read the article by Sallon Fallon, Nasty, Brutal and Short?, which summarizes the findings of Dr. Weston Price, a physician who became alarmed at the declining health of Americans back in the 1930's (was he "before his time" or what??). In a nutshell, he research the diets and health of tribal populations around the world that had not adopted the modern human diet of processed foods, sugar, refined flours, etc. He generally found tribal people to be exceedingly healthy with a wide variation in their respective diets... with the common denominator being a basis on whole foods.

This was something I was wondering about with regard to the Paleo Diet, and its dogmatic rejection of all grains, legumes, and dairy products. Sure, those foods weren't widely available in caveman days, but in more recent times, "whole food" versions were incorporated. And the traditional people who use(d) these foods were generally healthy and free of the diseases associated with excess consumption of "non-whole" foods.

The Paleo Diet seems to be a very good concept, but maybe it takes things too far in requiring total elimination of some food sources.

[Lost Dog]

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The Paleo Diet seems to be a very good concept, but maybe it takes things too far in requiring total elimination of some food sources.

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Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.

I tend to agree with you on the grains. To my mind, it's a matter of degree. There's the "perfect" diet and the worst. How much you want to perfect it is up the individual.

You can be healthy eating moderate amounts of pretty much anything. The further we stray from our nutritional roots, the closer we get to trouble. But, there's no reason to go all the way back.

[Canadian_Bacon]

Lost_Dog, do you think there is a 'perfect diet' for every phenotype? We know insulin sensativity varies across the populations along with probably 10 other things.

We humans LOVE to put boundaries on stuff and find the one right answer(see most of the scientific research done since the middle-ages). For some reason the concept of spread and "it depends" is very mentally ugly to us.

Personally, the more I learn about the human body the more I aam mazed by its dynamic nature. It has a remarkable ability to adjust and strive in a plathora of enviroments with very little in the way of negative consecuences.

In the end we will probably end up w/ a certain range of food/nutrient intake in which our INDIVIDuAL bodies can function to its genetic best with no 'best' aslong as it is within that range.

[Lost Dog]

CB,

I agree with you. There's no perfect diet. I think there's a range of "perfect" that we can get into.

Our Paleo ancestors ate what they could, when they could. Some might eat all day one day and hope for food the next. Other's figured out ways to always have food handy. Even then, was it the perfect food?

There's quite a range, as you can see in the many diet books that attest to the "perfect diet of culture x, y, z, etc." They can't all be perfect.

The mediteranean and okinawa diets aren't so close, yet the people seem healthy with each group. They might all work. I haven't read it yet, but I'm dying to see what the ancient people of "Sonoma" ate. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]