How The Most Popular Diets Impact Your Health

Intro

why are so many authors claiming animal products should be included in a healthy diet have you read the books promoting keto paleo low carb diets do they have science to support their claims so

Paleo keto

when it comes to things like paleo keto low-carb diets i i get it actually that i think the thinking is that refined carbohydrates are are really unhealthy choices for people and so in in these diets they’re getting out a lot of the processed foods and they’re thinking you know what did we eat you know that sort of back in paleo times when we were strong and running miles and miles and and we were living on you know these wild animals and wild plants and if we could just get back to that that that would be beneficial now that’s the paleo diet the keto diet is more if you can get your body to run on this different fuel called ketones which is we produce when we don’t get hardly any carbohydrates in our diets that that that’s somehow preferable and and so these diets are have become popular because people really like to eat meat you see plant foods are are all high carbohydrate foods with the single exception of nuts and seeds so fruits are you know what 90 92 percent of calories from carbohydrates um legumes and greens are 70 75 even non-starchy vegetables are are 58 60 percent of calories from carbohydrates so they’re all you know predominantly the mac the predominant macronutrient is carbohydrates with the exception of nuts and seeds that might be in the range of 12 14 percent of calories from

Plantcentered diets

carbohydrates they’re mostly fat but it’s really impossible to have a plant-centered diet that’s that’s you know no carbohydrates because plants are carbohydrate carbohydrates the only foods that are carbohydrate free of course are meat poultry fish uh eggs though pure oil is carbohydrate-free dairy is is some dairy is is very low in carbohydrates like cream and that butter of course is carbohydrate-free it’s pure fat and and things like cheese which are very high fat they’re much lower in carbohydrate than fluid milk but even fluid milk is is you know it’s about 30 32 or 34 percent of calories from carbohydrates two percent milk um the higher fat milks would would be lower in carbohydrates but so you get the picture you’re not if you’re eating plant foods you’re not going to be getting a low carbohydrate diet because plants aren’t low in carbohydrates so so a lot of these diets are very animal strong meat heavy diets and i have a lot of concern about these kinds of diets and and and certainly in some of the books you know lauren cordaine and others who are paleo promoters are are legitimate scientists and they’ve looked and and much of what they’re saying is we need to get rid of the processed foods and they’re absolutely right is that refined carbohydrates are a problem that highly processed foods are a problem to me what they get wrong is thinking that animal products uh are not an issue at all and and and i i again uh if you look back at paleolithic anthropology nutritional anthropology and and the estimates of what people actually consumed in paleolithic times one of the things that’s really interesting is that is that these these estimates are certainly indicated that these diets were fairly high in protein so around 25 30 percent of calories from protein which is what these new paleo folks do as well however the predictions around fat were a lot lower in fat than a lot of the lower carb diets today so they were estimating some 20 to you know as high as 35 percent fat but probably at the lower end for most of humanity for most of the paleolithic period in fact the first 80 percent of the paleolithic people humans were of the paleolithic period humans were essentially vegetarian we didn’t know how to hunt if there was something dead we might try to you know take bite out of it but but we didn’t we didn’t have the real capacity to kill anything of any size and it was only in the last

Paleo diets

20 percent of the paleolithic period that we learned how to hunt and even then these folks that have done this research said that that even then we were predominantly plant-based and and certainly people near the equator ate mostly plants as you move further north is so you increase the amount of hunting to provide enough food but even the biggest hunters on the planet were averaging 70 grams of fiber a day that’s more than the average vegan eats so they were eating a fair bit of fibrous plant matter the averages uh you know they the estimates were were 150 plus grams of fiber for people at the other end of the scale eating more plants so i don’t know of anybody eating a paleo diet today that comes anywhere close and if you look at the estimates for things like um like vitamin c five or six hundred milligrams a day that that’s probably more than the average vegan it’s way more than the average omnivore and it’s certainly far above what any paleo uh uh you know inclined person would consume potassium seven thousand ten thousand the the numbers vary a bit but again vegans don’t even get that where does potassium come from fruits and vegetables so so over and over and over again we have indications that the diet had a lot of plants the other thing to know is animals consumed by paleolithic man were certainly much lower in environmental contaminants if not free of environmental contaminants and and they were extremely lean so you’re looking at an estimated percentage of calories from fat ranging from six to sixteen percent of calories today’s domestic animals are closer to 40 even 50 percent of calories from fat and the very high fat products even higher and and so they’re very different these are not the same things and if you look at domestic animals well we know these uh persistent organic pollutants move up the food chain uh they’re often pumped full of hormones and antibiotics there’s all there are all kinds of factors that affect uh you know the the the healthfulness of meat today now we’ve got a number of studies that have looked at and compared people eating you know various amounts of carbohydrates and consistently the people eating the least carbohydrates have about somewhere in the range of 26 to 32 percent higher mortality rates the most

Carbohydrates

interesting i think of these studies was a recent study that came out by seidelman’s group and and in fact what they found was that the highest rates of mortality occurred in people consuming the least carbohydrates they had a 32 increase in mortality now the lowest mortality was associated with people consuming about 50 to 55 of calories from carbohydrate and then in the high carbohydrate range it was just fascinating because on average they had a 23 percent higher risk than people at the lowest and but the range within that category was absolutely huge so the bulk of the people that had an increased mortality that you could see on this chart was was significantly increased the the the researchers explained that these people were getting most of their carbohydrates from refined foods these were people in poor countries that were relying on white flour white rice products as their primary source of calories now within that same category we saw the very lowest mortality rates and we would expect that that category of high carbohydrate eaters were getting their carbohydrates from whole plant foods now the other thing that seidelman’s study showed is if you replace carbohydrate with animal fat or protein you increase and you will actually increase mortality by 18 but if you replace carbohydrate with plant fat or protein you reduce mortality by 18 and so this is very consistent in the literature we’ve seen multiple studies showing that plant predominant diets are protective for the human species