The other day I got an email from a friend in the paleo world with the following quote in it:

I'm pretty torn about AHS. It was fun, but I don't see a good future in it because people are unwilling to call out bullshit. Anyone who is pretty much has already quit in frustration like you and Mat Lalonde. I see myself in that position soon. 

Perhaps I can partially correct that by addressing a bit of steaming dung in the nutrition blogosphere right now.

Don Matesz has always seemed to me a mostly harmless kook. His arguments have always been emphatic and almost comically earnest, but otherwise lacking in subtlety, grace, and wit. This makes his prose, to me, almost unbearable to read regardless of content. Worst of all, he claims “alternative” pseudo-credentials as if they should be impressive and routinely touts the kind of fashionable unscientific crap that has always just rubbed me the wrong way.

I confess that Don can claim at least partial responsibility for my lack of appearance at AHS 2011. The appearance there of so many folks touting pseudoscientific nonsense, and the general lack of thematic coherence exemplified by the roster there made me want to have nothing to do with it, even though there were definitely many excellent presenters with great ideas as well (you know who you are).

Not so much guilt by association as priority management. I had a real academic career years ago. I’ve done the “pointed questions and challenge from the audience” thing enough back when I got paid to do so and I have no taste for it now as performance theatre, even as I may be willing to joust from time to time out here in the aether. I’ve also done the “squirming in your seat while people say outrageous or absurd things” when in academe, but this promised to be an order of magnitude worse.

Then Don proved me right by supposedly forswearing paleo just a few months before he presented at AHS. The author of “Primal Wisdom”, paid purveyor of dietary wisdom, and also a self-styled expert on the “wisdom” of primitive superstition (shamanism), naturopathy (whatever that is), reincarnation, meditation, crystals, etc… reversed his polarity from being a near carnivore who had little use for plants to a near vegan.

It took him 12 years to figure out he was on the wrong diet, charging people for health advice the whole while.

Recently, some blogger friends alerted me to a series he was writing “debunking” paleo. As I have not identified myself as “paleo” for a long time, and Matesz has always been so painful to read, I didn’t bother to waste any time with it.

I can't be bothered with creationists or vegans, generally.

Then I was alerted that he was using me, quite selectively and inaccurately, as a representative foil for his debunking.

Me, the author of several essays that were among the first to seriously criticize “paleo” ideas, written while Don was still full-on “paleo” himself. 

So I posted this response in two parts on his blog, here expanded as it would not all fit there under the HTML limits, and for your entertainment.

Congratulations, Don.

You've managed to use my name to construct a straw man argument for each of your points in fine fashion.

But have you read any of my posts that are newer than say, the last 2 years???

You say:

"I don't know who Dr. Harris imagines believes that plants or plant compounds are 'magic' (or what he means by 'magic') "

If you actually read the essay you linked to, you could see exactly what I mean by magic.

What I mean by plant compounds not being “magic”, which I state clearly in the essay, is that there is no one plant that we need to eat to avoid disease. No acai berry, resveratrol, or any particular vitamin or “anti-oxidant” is the key to health.

"All of these compounds are originally synthesized by plants and, except for niacin, appear in animal tissues only because the animal ate plants directly or ate another animal that ate plants."

Yes, Don. Isn't that neat how animals aggregate nutrients for us in addition to providing ones that we CANNOT GET AT ALL from plants, like B12 and long chain N-3 fatty acids?

If you were sincerely interested in what I think of plant-specific compounds, you might have read and quoted the following essay to see my current thinking about plant compounds and hormesis:

William Munny Eats His Vegetables

It was written a full year ago, so you’ve had plenty of time to see it. It describes how plant compounds can be beneficial via hormesis. 

Then you might have read and quoted the next group of essays and maybe looked at my dietary recommendations. You would have seen that I view both animal fats and starches as equally legitimate and healthy sources of caloric fuel, a view at odds with essentially all of the other “paleo” sources you quote in your straw man construction.

Paleo 2.0

There is no such thing as a macronutrient

No such thing as a macronutrient part II

The archevore diet

After reading those, you would see that there is plenty of room for healthy starch and fruits and vegetables as well as tasty animals in my dietary world.

Moving on, you could re-read this essay:

Statins and the Cholesterol Hypothesis

Nowhere in this essay do I say that "no blood cholesterol fraction has any influence on heart disease".

The point I make is that "cholesterol measurements" (really lipoproteins –it is never clear to me that you understand the difference….do you?) are reflections of dietary choices that may influence risk and are contextual. I do not say  "have no influence". I do say  "not worth measuring" and “there is no proof that manipulating them modifies risk favorably” - just the opposite, in fact.

The lipoprotein system is likely part of the innate immune system and is involved in the repair of vascular damage. So LDL and other species definitely “have an influence” on heart disease. But that is not the same as saying that particular LDL levels CAUSE heart disease, and it most certainly is not the same as saying that modifying our LDL levels with drugs or even diet is the proximate cause of changes in heart disease risk.

As far as animal fat or cholesterol consumption per se causing heart disease, I say to you, PROVE IT.

There is no prospective intervention study showing such.

Quoting some politically influenced acronymic government mouthpiece that is drawing inferences (“risk factors”) is not proof of anything.

You ask, rhetorically:

"Should I really believe that Michael Eades and Kurt Harris know more about the effect of saturated fats on heart disease than the members of the Institute of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board, composed of individuals who have invested their whole lives in studying nutrition both as scholars and bench scientists?"

Believe whatever you want, but if you don't side with me and with Dr. Eades, then you also are firmly contra Guyenet, Masterjohn and Colpo, just to name a few.

Do you think Mike Eades and I are the only ones who doubt the diet/heart nonsense?

Will you take the “expert” Walter Willett's advice and eat more industrially extracted PUFA as soybean and cottonseed oil for your heart?

Or will you side with Bill Lands, who gives the exact opposite advice, instead?

Pay your money and take your chances, Don.

Despite your decision to be willfully naïve, there is indeed some “chaos” and lack of consensus in dietary recommendations. However did you get snookered into eating meat in the first place? Is this consensus of all the experts you claim less than a year old, coinciding perfectly with your come-to-Jesus moment?

The thing is, you’ve really made a big mistake in thinking it must be either plants OR animals, either fats OR carbohydrates, Don.

Can you not see this?

At the risk of exhausting the term, I suggest you are operating from a Keyesian paradigm of diet.

As is anyone who thinks we must choose either fats or carbohydrates, or between plants and animals.

The Keyesain paradigm of diet is that the secret to health is a binary choice of macronutrient categories, one bad and the other good.

Keyes felt that fats were bad, and therefore carbohydrate was good. As others were, Taubes was correct in concluding that Keyes’ data were fraudulent and that his predictions about fat and cholesterol consumption have never proven true. But Taubes then went on and made the contrapositive error  - concluding that if animal fats are innocent in disease, the real culprit must be the entire macronutrient class of carbohydrate.

You have now made the same signal error, concluding that if homo sapiens is not an obligate carnivore, then we must be essentially vegan by nature, and if we are not “designed” to eat mostly animal fats for fuel, then they must be poison and carbohydrate is to be the preferred macronutrient at risk of our very health.

Plants are now to be favored and animals are anathema.

You’ve added the false dichotomy of plant/animal to the one Keyes gave us of  fats and carbs.

You’re now Charles Washington in reverse.

MacDougall, that sloppy fraud Campbell, his acolyte Furhman, and now you are all stuck in a half-century old false dichotomy first invented or popularized by Keyes. Have you not read Denise Minger’s excellent and careful writings on any of this, especially about “forks over knives”? You certainly write as if you haven’t.

No shades of grey for you, no sir! Forward with your binary thinking, stuck axle-deep in Ancel Keyes’ binary dietary paradigm. 

Someday you will feel quite foolish about this. Much more foolish than I feel for merely eating VLC for a while.

I have not and do not make an evolutionary argument either for or against “distance running”. I have described possible dangers of excessive marathon running based on actual peer-reviewed scientific studies. I personally run up to 20K per week currently and have stated so publicly many times. This is totally at odds with DeVaney and I have never stated agreement with any of his reasoning on exercise, including his “fractal” speculations.

I really, really dislike people that misquote and misattribute what I have said to try and use me as a foil in making a point.

I agree with Cordain and DeVaney on very little, and especially not on the value of making ad hoc evolutionary arguments. 

I was debunking “paleo” reasoning when you were still Mr. Primal and firmly in the paleo camp.

I eat potatoes and white rice and bananas, as well as plenty of ruminant fat. I don’t buy into binary macronutrient dichotomies. On the other hand, the three of you all do…..

DeVaney and Cordain and YOU are the ones reasoning from an armchair about what we are “supposed” to eat. You are using the same kind of ad-hoc “paleo “reasoning they are. You’ve just now reverse-engineered it with the assumption that plants are the goodh choice, instead of “lean meats”. 

So although you have supposedly said “farewell” to paleo, the ship left with you still clinging to her stern. No separation at all in fundamental assumptions, just a different a priori bias now because “your allergies got worse”……

You've gone from near-carnivory to MacDougall veganism with no real explanation for why you should be any more credible now than you were then.

Don, you're like those alcoholics that quit the drink but turn hard to Jesus, and now chain- smoke while eating too many glazed doughnuts at AA meetings.

You’ve gone from one nutty extreme to another, and now have zero credibility left. And I'm not even counting the superstitious nonsense you tout about "traditional chinese" medicine, yin and yang, “shamanism” and the other pseudoscientific bullshit that peppers your blog.

I am asking you to please leave my name out of your dumb crusade against "paleo", especially if you can't quote me accurately or even bother to read my more recent writings. 

Just quote yourself if you want to show how lame paleo is.

You've got plenty of posts that would fit much better than cherry- picking ones I put up more than 2 years ago.

PS: Are you sure you know what your favorite color is?

Don't worry,  I'm not broke.

When I was about 10 years old, my dad was stationed in Naples Italy with the US Navy's Armed Forces Courier Service. So we lived in Naples for 3 years. We'd travel on the Autostrada on vacation and get passed by the early 70's version of this car. The targa models are the ones I remember the best, going easily 120 mph with half the horsepower this car has.

So for years I coveted one of these iconic vehicles, whose silhouette is immediately recognizable to anyone old enough to know what a car is, and which in sprit and soul has more continuity than any other sports car you can buy.

I bought this one in late 2008 with only 2000 miles on it, and it now has only 6281 total.

Excellent condition. Never wrecked. Never driven in the snow. May have seem rain 3 times at the most. It has been a garage queen most of its life since manufactured in Stuttgart and that is why I am selling it.

I've got the nostalgia bit out of my system, and I when I want a joy ride I saddle up my Ducati more often than not.

Here are the vitals:

Porsche 911 Carrera S 2007

3.8 liter engine with power EMS and intake uprades by Evolution Motorsports

Approx 380 bhp  Top speed over 186 mph.

Meteor Grey metallic paint with Black interior

6 Speed manual

Heated Seats, Leather Seats, Leather door handle inserts I installed myself

Rear and rear quarter windows are tinted which helps keep it cool.

Sport Chrono Package

Porsche Communication Management System

Navigation System

Sport Exhaust system

Self Dimming mirrors

Xenon headlights

Champion RG5 Monolite 18" forged wheels with Yokohama tires. Substantially lighter upgrade from stock wheels.

Bose premium CD sound system 13 speakers 325 watts.

For more images visit PHOTOS.

If seriously interested, email me at paleonu1@gmail.com to discuss.

I've added the following to the original review:

Robb tells me this hunt took place at a 16,000 acre private ranch, which if managed for trophy hunting is large enough to have animals that behave similar to truly wild ones. Atlatls are not legal to take big game in Colorado, although several other states do allow them during primitive weapons seasons. So no game laws were violated in this July hunt with primitive weapons, as the animals were not part of the common weal.

The animal shot was the one aimed at. It appeared  (to me) that it was quartering away properly, but the elk may have turned its neck toward the shooter at impact. The chest was the aiming point, the dart hitting high and anterior but still providing a mortal wound. The stone point cut the cerebral vessels and embedded in the body of the 3rd or 4th vertebra. The elk was tracked for about 30 minutes and went down from blood loss, where it was dispatched with more darts to the chest.

This was an impressive shot. The distance looked to be in excess of 30 yards (Robb estimates 35-40), which would be really pushing it with a longbow, or even a modern, flat-shooting compound device (not really a bow at all in my opinion - these and those abominable crossbows are more like powderless rifles in terms of the skill level required and practical range when compared to the longbow or atlatl).

Robb made his own atlatl and darts and practiced for hours a day weeks before the show. This speaks highly of the producers that they encouraged this skill development to ensure hunting efficacy.

I watched the two hour reality show "I, caveman" on the discovery channel tonight. This features our good friend Robb Wolf, who apparantly participated some time early this summer in the high country of Colorado.

I had trepidations about this.

This show had a few strikes against it in the expectations department.

1) Morgan Spurlock. I had an image of him as the smug populist who proved in the movie "Supersize Me" that eating until you vomit might actually make you fat and unhealthy. Maybe for his next movie he can drink water until he gets cerebral edema? That would provide some teaching moments, and maybe people would be more cautious about all that water we have available... But I also just suffered through his latest movie on netflix which was about how product placement in cinema is ubiquitous and advertising is really, really common. So I thought maybe I had had enough of Spurlock.

2) The caveman moniker, last seen in association with the image of a retired economics professor towing his land rover up a suburban driveway, has not been a good predictor of sound and edifying journalism.

3) The trailer, which has our friend Robb clothed in animal skins, looked, I am sorry, so absurd as to be startling, and I was really, really worried this would be a cringe-making spectacle.

But it was worth watching.

I usually hate reality shows.

But this was one of the more reasonable pieces of reality fiction I have seen on television.

Among the cast:

Morgan Spurlock, who for this show is under someone else's direction, is surprisingly excellent. An honest and good-humored participant and with the voice of an objective narrator.

Manu, a handsome Maori woman (Reminds me of Rena Owen from the films Once Were Warriors) who starts out with brain fog from hypothermia but later proves to be both resourceful (improvising a water filter with charcoal and animal skins) and tough.

Robert, who is telegenic enough to command the most screen time in the edit and starts with the heart of a trophy hunter, but like so many trophy hunters I have seen, does not have the quiet determination and guts that is found in the best meat hunters and ecohunters*, and that ultimately brings home the bacon. 

Robb Wolf, who appears to be one of the few modern humans in to have killed a Wapiti (elk) with a primitive atlatl. On film.

It is possible that you have to be a primitive weapons hunter like I am to really appreciate this, but seeing Robb kill an elk with an atlatl is pretty impressive.

An Atlatl is a force multiplying weapon that hurls a long arrow-like projectile called a dart. It arose independently as a technology in at least a few disparate places around the world, at least 30,000 ybp and about 20,000 y before the bow. The principle is similar, but rather than a progressive linear acceleration to the arrow, the much longer dart is accelerated by a lever. The bow can be seen as an evolution of the atlatl, which in turn was a quantum leap from the spear, whether thrown or thrust. Not only could animals or enemies be engaged within realistic stalking distance - 20-40 yards - but the substitution of leverage and skill for short range brute force, allowing penetration of vital organs accurately at a distance, may have allowed more individuals, including women and children, to participate effectively in hunting.

Now, I will tell you that unless you have a scoped rifle and a rest, a shot to the neck is not a high probability hit. One has to hit the spinal cord or trachea or the cerebral vessels to reliably kill or even bring down an animal. A going away chest shot, with the projectile slipping between ribs which angle like the wood shingles on a tudor home is ideal. Penetration of at least one side of the chest, creating penumothorax/hemothorax on that side is preferred and more reliable. Penetration of both lungs is perfection. A nice hole in the aorta or heart is merely a bonus.  

Robb tells me this hunt took place at a 16,000 acre private ranch, which if managed for trophy hunting is large enough to have animals that behave similar to truly wild ones. Atlatls are not legal to take big game in Colorado, although several other states do allow them during primitive weapons seasons. So no game laws were violated in this July hunt with primitive weapons, as the animals were not part of the common weal.

The animal shot was the one aimed at. It appeared  (to me) that it was quartering away properly, but the elk may have turned its neck toward the shooter at impact. The chest was the aiming point, the dart hitting high and anterior but still providing a mortal wound. The stone point cut the cerebral vessels and embedded in the body of the 3rd or 4th vertebra. The elk was tracked for about 30 minutes and went down from blood loss, where it was dispatched with more darts to the chest.

This was an impressive shot. The distance looked to be in excess of 30 yards (Robb estimates 35-40), which would be really pushing it with a longbow, or even a modern, flat-shooting compound device (not really a bow at all in my opinion - these and those abominable crossbows are more like powderless rifles in terms of the skill level required and practical range when compared to the longbow or atlatl).

Robb made his own atlatl and darts and practiced for hours a day weeks before the show. This speaks highly of the producers that they encouraged this skill development to ensure hunting efficacy.

I know I will never forget the first deer I killed with my longbow 10 years ago, and I doubt that you could really know the emotions Robb experienced after ending a several-day fast for his "tribe" by killing this animal so intimately and honestly.

Other features I enjoyed were the balance between throwing the tribe to the wolves and artificial assistance with instructions from Atlatl Bob.

And there is reasonable and sober commentary by men who appear to be real experts in biology and antropology, especially a biologist named Kuiper.

There is no succor for for veganism or even vegetarianism, or indeed any kind of trendy political correctness.

Yet there is also very little of the macho trophy hunting "whack 'em and stack 'em" posturing of the type seen on most of the outdoor shows originating in the southern US. Shows replete with mechanised transport that makes the staged "hunt" as challenging as bowling, and a nu-metal soundtrack more appropriate to first person shooter video games.

I even enjoyed the little meat-hunting ethical lesson given by Spurlock at the end, whose dogged coyote-and- roadrunner pursuit of a large muskrat reminds me of no one so much as myself at some points.

I, Caveman. Check it out.

Robb, thanks for the added details!

*For the origin of these categories of hunter and literate musings on hunting big game, see books by David Petersen. I also highly recommend the writings of Don Thomas and subscribing to the periodical Traditional Bowhunter.

I’ve not had time to write the magnum opus blog posts that the repuditation of the CIH really requires (and not much can be added to what Stephan has already written), so I thought this was a good opportunity to get the message outside of my own echo chamber by responding in detail to Jimmy’s inquiry. My response to him is pretty long, and I doubt if he will quote much of it, so I’ve reproduced the email response, with his inquiry broken into bits in italics and my responses afterward in roman.

Kurt, I've been getting a lot of questions this year from my "Livin' La Vida Low-Carb" blog readers about the concepts in Paul Jaminet's book "Perfect Health Diet."  He advocates for eating white potatoes and white rice as part of a low-carb eating plan.

I also have come to see most starchy plant organs as perfectly legitimate fuel sources. 

Low carb plans have helped people lose fat by reducing food reward from white flour and excess sugar and maybe linoleic acid. This is by accident as it happens that most of the "carbs" in our diet are coming in the form of manufactured and processed items that are simply not real food. Low carb does not work for most people via effects on blood sugar or insulin "locking away" fat. Insulin is necessary to store fat, but is not the main hormone regulating fat storage. That would be leptin.

My reading of the anthropology and ethnology literature, as well as my current understanding of biochemistry and metabolism, lead me to see the human metabolism as a multi-fuel stove, equally capable of burning either glucose or fatty acids at the cellular level depending on the organ, the task and the diet, and equally capable of depending on either animal fats or starches from plants as our dietary fuel source, depending on the biome (biological environment) we find ourselves born in or that we migrate to. 

We are a highly adaptable species. It is not plausible that carbohydrates as a class of macronutrient are toxic.

Diabetics need to avoid high carbohydrate intake the same way those with gall bladder disease need to avoid fat, but carbohydrates do not cause obesity or diabetes and fat consumption does not cause gall bladder disease (in fact low fat diets may contribute to gallstone formation via stasis) 

Here's a one-page explanation and illustration of Jaminet's program:http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?page_id=8

Several places in the book and on Jaminet's blog (http://perfecthealthdiet.com) he specifically warns against the danger of a very low-carb diet (defined as less than about 300-400 calories per day (~100 grams) from so-called "safe starches"--taro, plantains, yams, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, white rice and berries) because less than this leads to the risks, including:  1) "insufficient production of mucus in the digestive tract" leading to dysbiosis

I have not looked into that claim enough to comment in detail, but it seems plausible. 

 2) vitamin deficiencies (he particularly mentions Vitamin C and glutathione 

Yes I would agree with that. Whites and sweets are loaded with ascorbic acid.

on pages 253-254)In particular he emphasizes these calories need to come from "safe starches and berrries" and "don't count vegetables as as a carb source (because) they are a fiber (and therefore a fat) source" (page 45).

My list is white potatoes, sweet potatoes, white rice and bananas. If more exotic fare like plantains and taro is available to you, that is fine, too. Except for white rice, these are all whole food starch sources with good mineral and micronutrient content that have been eaten in good health for thousands of years in many environments by genetically diverse populations. Many of these plants have spread far from their biomes of origin and serve as staples for populations who have adopted them with success over just the past few thousand years.

These starchy plant organs or vegetables are like night and day compared to most cereal grains, particularly wheat. One can eat more than half of calories from these safe starches without the risk of disease from phytates and mineral deficiencies one would have from relying on grains.

White rice is kind of a special case. It lacks the nutrients of root vegetables and starchy fruits like plantain and banana, but is good in reasonable quantities as it is a very benign grain that is easy to digest and gluten free. 

I think consumption of quality animal products is the sine qua non of a healthy diet. 

Once you have that, then eating starchy plants is more important for nutrition than eating colorful leafy greens - the veggies that are high fiber and low starch. (Some green leafy vegetables are good sources of folate and along with some fruits are sources of flavonoids that may benefit you via hormesis.)

I view most non-starchy fruit with indifference. In reasonable quantities it is fine but it won't save your life either. I like citrus now and then myself, especially grapefruit. But better to rely on starchy vegetables for carbohydrate intake than fruit.

Primitive populations practicing horticulture or hunting and gathering do not eat a lot of big green salads with lots of variety, but they do eat healthy starchy plant organs with monotony on top of their foraged animal foods.

Eating a very low carb (VLC) diet for a period of time can be a good fat loss maneuver, acting via the effects of ketosis on appetite suppression. I also like to see people limit themselves to two or three meals a day with absolutely no snacking, and it may give benefits via hormesis for longer periods of fasting (24 hours or more) once in a while.

But a long term VLC ketogenic diet is not a good idea. It does not mimic the ancestral diet in general, even if some populations have tolerated it when they had to. There is no need for most people to do it to lose fat, as food reward effects are more powerful. I would advocate long term ketosis in those with neurodegenerative brains diseases like Alzheimer dementia and Parkinson disease, and a 10 day water fast followed by long term ketogenic diet is worth trying if you have cancer. 

But I would not recommend VLC ketosis as a long term way of life the way I would not recommend running a half marathon every day, or lifting weights to failure on a daily basis, or taking chemotherapy drugs when you don't have cancer. Ketosis probably stresses the body and works via hormesis. But the clean up and repair response cannot happen if there is no rest from it. 

A recent post he wrote for cancer patients revealed his recommendion of obtaining 400 to 600 glucose calories a day, mainly from these safe starches. He says it is important to avoid a glucose deficiency, since glycosylated proteins are the means of intercellular coordination, and defects in glycosylation are characteristic of the cancer phenotype.

My arguments are based more on ethnography and anthropology than some of Paul's theorizing, but I arrive at pretty much the same place that he does. I personally eat around 30% carbohydrate now and have not gained an ounce from when I ate 10-15% (and I have eaten as high as 40% for over a year also with zero fat gain) If anything I think even wider ranges of carbohydrate intake are healthy. 

One can probably eat well over 50% of calories from starchy plant organs as long as the animal foods you eat are of high quality and micronutrient content. 

Grass fed ruminants, pastured butter and eggs and wild caught cold water fish are the kernel of a healthy diet, but the fuel source can be larger than the kernel on a caloric basis if the kernel is high quality and consistent.

He notes, "You don’t want to aggravate this with a self-induced glucose deficiency." I'd like to write a blog post about this topic of "safe starches" to help my readers understand fact from fiction and will quote from your response.  THANK YOU! If you cannot assist me, then please let me know so I ask someone else to contribute.

I've given you plenty to quote from, Jimmy. Go for it!

Warnings may be in order.

I told Robb I was woefully under-read and had been out of the loop over the past few months, so he should be prepared for hearsay and rank speculation.

The interview was ex tempore and I had no knowledge of the questions beforehand. So there are a lot of verbal sidebars to make sure listeners know the context of some of my answers. These detours, when combined with some apparent digital gaps in the audio, make me sound as if I have ADD and aphasia at the same time, at least in some spots.

The interview is rather long at 1:45.

I've also updated my headshot. I hate it when people use ancient photos to represent themselves. There is a chiropractor in my town who often says hello at the grocery store, but I sometimes fail to recognize him as his photo in newspaper ads is from the Reagan administration.

Not really.

But I did just spend several hours doing a needed update. I think this is about version 3.0 since the original back-of-the-envelope diet I first put on the web in June 2009. That was a diet I had been using successfully clinically for more than two years.

The emphasis on animal products remains.

The emphasis on real whole foods - kill it or dig it up with a stick - remains and is enhanced.

Macro ratios had already been de-emphasized in v 2.0, but that has now been made even more explicit in the steps, and not just in the coda. 

Things which in my mind were "givens" but had been pointed out to me were not clearly emphasized have been made more explicit, like sleep and eating some offal.

I've deleted references to legumes other than avoiding soy and peanuts, as other legumes seem more and more benign to me.

It remains congruent with, and is perhaps now more so with other whole foods diets that I consider "Paleo 2.0" approaches, like that of Chris Kresser, Paul Jaminet, Chris Masterjohn (he won't force you to eat wheat) and J Stanton, and with more potatoes and less steak, Stephan Guyenet. 

I've not had a chance to do big blog posts about food reward yet. Those who might have seen some comments of mine elsewhere will see I find merit in the idea, but I don't know its ontological status yet.

Whether reducing food reward is restoring the EM2 or whether it is just a useful fat loss maneuver I am not sure. Either way, I think that is part of how diets like mine and maybe all diets may work, so I have emphasized that a bit more in the rank ordering.

There is also a notable but not strictly scientific bias I have used for this re-write.

It could fairly be called data mining or reverse engineering, but I've tried to write the steps such that most of the weight optimization failures that I know of would have not been following the new steps.

For example, I know of people who failed despite eating very low carb, but I cannot think of many that actually ate only twice a day with no snacks, never ate from a box, avoided restaurants and never ate ANY liquid calories, including milk and cream. So this has resulted in modifications that make my own current diet noncompliant in a few ways (I still add cream to my coffee), but I think these changes make it more universal.

This does seem to work well for many people, but nothing works for everyone.  If it optimizes your weight and health and you are satisfied, you can always break a few rules and see what you can still get away with.

I'll try to do a re-write of "how to lose weight" sometime soon and add more therapeutic tricks for when the whole foods low-NAD idea is not enough.

If you're bored and want some entertainment, there is a thread following this article on Atlantic Online.

The article, by Atlantic editor Megan McArdle, concerns whether grain consumption is responsible for Obesity. 

I was alerted to this by following a trackback, and found someone had referenced my post with the eviscerated bison as a rebuttal to these assertions by McArdle in the article:

A ribeye and an arugula salad with oilive oil and vinegar is almost as far from what our paleolithic ancestors ate as pasta primavera and an angel-food cake.  The meat our ancestors ate in the wild was not mostly fat-rich steak--game animals don't have that much body fat, and their muscles are a lot less tender. 

Yet it's only now that we're getting fat.  Which suggests to me that the cause is something other than the variation from our "natural", meat-rich diet.

A poster says:

Megan, 

I think you're working on old-paleo news (Cordain), not the newer stuff. Check out Kurt Harris's Archvore and his discussion of fats in wild animals.

Her response:

He acknowledges that even tucking the fat trimmings into his deerburger makes it only 25% fat by weight--or about standard for fatty chuck. The other cuts would be much leaner. Cows are bred to be basically huge sacks of fat and muscle; they would never survive in the wild because they require too much pasture, and they're super slow. I'm not making silly arguments about how game has no fat, but everyone I know who has butchered both western game (where there are no unnatural suburban gardens to live off), and even grass fed steers, has told me the same thing: the steers are clearly designed for eating, not survival.

My response:

You are perhaps missing some of the information. The point is that aboriginal peoples didn't eat supermarket cuts preferentially, so comparing the fat content of the center of a 20th or 21st century lean steak tells us nothing about how much fat aboriginal people, who could and did exploit the whole animal, ate. 

In fact, they exploited the fattiest parts of the animal preferentially, and the point of my posts is not that the steaks were fat in the center of the cut, but that that the center of a steak is not the relevant metric of what we evolved eating, any more than the fat in a skinless chicken breast would represent what hunter-gathers would get from a wild fowl.

And of course 25% fat by weight is about 60% fat by calories, due to the high energy density of long chain fatty acids. And that is wild deerburger with none of the omental or mesenteric or bone marrow or brain fat thrown in, which would elevate the fat calories in a whitetail to well over 60%.

My other examples, the hamburger made from grass fed lamb and steers, were over 30% fat by weight and therefore over 70% by calories, and this was artificially low as in the case of one steer, there was over 50lbs of suet left over, and none of the brains, marrow or mesenteric fat was counted. I know it was over 50lbs of extra fat because I had the container and I weighed it. This was a 100% grass finished organically raised steer.

The images of the bison on my website ( hardly "bred to be fat" given the recent history of domestication) and the anthropological data in "Imagining Head Smashed in" as well as other extensive data on hunting behavior before the modern fear of saturated fat, make it clear that animal fat was the most available and most exploited nutrient in game for most of hominin history.

The current preference for lean meats is a misguided cultural artifact of bad science and dietary superstition that is only about 50 years old.

McArdle:

Sort of. Without refrigeration (or in the case of plains tribes, much of any means of storage), aboriginals did not only slaughter meat when it was fattest and most succulent (and preservation techniques, for obvious reasons, frequently cut down on the fat content). We tend to confuse buying half-a-steer with what our ancestors did, but it's not true AFAIK. They ate fresh, deliciously fatty meat mostly in the fall on the farm and prairie, not all year round. 

Again, I am not arguing that our ancestors ate no fat! But that you cannot reason from what your deliciously fatty grass fed bison looks like in September, to what the Sioux ate the other 11 months out of the year. I've seen what the animals look like after a Wyoming winter, and they're pretty damn skinny unless someone's been bringing them fodder. Furry, yes, but they've used up a lot of their fat stores. In other places, it's the dry season instead of the cold season, but the effects are similar.

Harris:

Sorry, wrong again. Animals were butchered preferentially when fattest, and pemmican eaten in the depths of winter.

Pemmican is mostly fat. Here is a nutritional breakdown from US Wellness Meats, where they make it the old-fashioned way:

Est. Percent of Calories from:
Fat 78.8% Carbs 0.0%
Protein 20.0%

I know folks who make their own according to traditional recipes and the fat percentage is similar. Berries can be added for carbohydrate, but all pemmican was high in fat traditionally.

So native americans of the plains were definitely not on low fat diets for "11 months out of the year". They knew how to preserve game meat and they loaded it with fat. They were smart. You can stay alive indefinitely on 80/20 fat/protein (% by calories) but will die quickly on the reverse ratio due to protein toxicity


And even a western animal that looks skinny has plenty of fatty bits that are not steak. Like the tongue for instance. The lean meat meme is a modern cultural prejudice derived from the flawed diet/heart hypothesis. Aboriginals around the world ate as much fat as they could, and if the animals were always fat they always ate it. Think zebras in Africa.

McArdle:

Yes, of course animals were butchered preferentially when fattest, as they are in every society. And I know what's in pemmican. But they did not put up a year's supply of pemmican every September.

Harris:

They ate a lot of fat whenever they could - they certainly preserved fatty meat to eat for many months into the winter, which you initially denied. It is impossible to eat enough protein to live on without fat or carbohydrate and they certainly were not maintaining greenhouses or shopping at whole foods for carbohydrate in the winter. So they would not have survived at all without plenty of fat, unless you disagree with the metabolic fact that one cannot live on nothing but protein for months on end. Google "rabbit starvation".

McArdle:

You're refuting claims I haven't made--that people weren't eating fat. I'm saying that the idea that they had these hugely high fat diets year round isn't true. There were periods of high fat good eating, and periods of lean. But the year round, super awesome high fat meat diet is not how anyone ever lived outside of the Amazon. If you're refrigerating meat to eat later, you're already eating very different from your paleo ancestors.

Harris:

"The meat our ancestors ate in the wild was not mostly fat-rich steak--game animals don't have that much body fat, and their muscles are a lot less tender. We've selectively bred our domesticated animals for considerably more succulence than our ancestors enjoyed."

You made this claim implying that modern diets are richer in animal fats than what our ancestors ate when they ate animals. I am refuting it with what I have presented. You are claiming that our ancestors ate less fat when they ate animals. That is not true, no matter what you prefer to believe. 

I have no idea what a "year round super-awesome high fat diet is". I've eaten about 60% of calories as animal fats (about 25% saturated fat) and 20% as carbohydrate for the last 4 years and my BMI is 21.5 and waist is 30". Maybe that is what you mean.

I have claimed that ancestral peoples that hunted animals had access to plenty of fat and exploited it as much as they could. You've presented nothing but assertions that they could not have eaten much fat, and I have refuted them.

"game animals don't have much body fat" is factually completely incorrect, as I have shown, unless you think skeletal muscles are the only constituents of the animal's body. I think more than 60% fat by calories cannot reasonably said to be "not much fat" - 

An entire animal eaten head to tail would be at least 50% calories as fat no matter how "lean" the muscles are once you count mesentery, omentum, brains, marrow, subcutaneous fat and solid viscera. Every single cell in an animals body has fats in the cell membrane. 

Whether eating an animal killed at the end of winter, the fattest, the leanest, or the pemmican which is 80% fat, there was plenty of fat available and eaten year round. I know that is not what you want to believe because you have been taught to fear animal fats, but that is the truth.

The amazon? Not sure what that would have to do with anything.

And FWIW, I don't blame the obesity epidemic on carbohydrates in general. I blame it on wheat, sugar (including HFCS) and linoleic acid. Not potatoes..

But definitely not fat - consumption figures and the arguments I have just used all refute that animal fat or fatty steaks has anything to do with the obesity epidemic.

McArdle:

Sigh. No, I am not arguing that our ancestors were on the Dean Ornish diet. I claimed that people who think that they are eating a paleolithic diet by giving up bread and ordering half a steer are fooling themselves. A steer is not an animal that our ancestors would have had access to. It has been bred by us to be more tender, and to provide relatively more of desireable cuts from large muscle groups, and it is not just preferentially slaughtered when it is fattest, but only slaughtered when it is fattest. Our paleolithic ancestors did not eat as if every day were high summer. And they ate a lot more organ meat. You are "refuting" me by arguing that the hamburger in your fridge sure is high fat. I was arguing that what the "paleo" folks seem to argue is closer to nature is no more natural than a pound cake.

I happen to agree that the low-fat obsession seems, in retrospect, to have been fairly silly, and that sweeteners seem to be objectively worse for you. But a modern paleo, unless he's spending several months a year living entirely on beef jerky, rendered tallow, and dried berries, is not eating anything remotely close to a paleo diet. You *couldn't*--it's only legal to hunt when the animals are fattest.

Harris:

You're still perseverating on how much fat could or could not have been eaten. I think I've addressed that adequately and shown that you are wrong. The only reason it matters is that you claim animal fat content as being different from the ancestral on a "paleo" diet. The point is that saturated and animal fat are harmless and you can eat a lot of it or not very much and be healthy, and you cannot claim as evidence that ancestral populations could not have eaten the amount of animal fat in a modern fatty steak because it was not available to them. That I have refuted, you cannot make that argument because it is not true as indicated by all the actual evidence. 

You said:

"I was arguing that what the "paleo" folks seem to argue is closer to nature is no more natural than a pound cake."

Now that you've chosen to re-emphasize it, I will address this claim, which is even sillier than the one about fat.

A typical "paleo" meal, consisting of either a fat or lean steak, a green salad and a sweet potato, is not only healthy but is indeed closer to ancestral diets than pound cake. No because of what it contains, but because of what it does not contain. 

Processed white flour, a concentrated source of gluten and wheat germ agglutinin, sugar in the form of sucrose or high fructose corn syrup, and especially, industrial vegetable oils heavy in n-6 linoleic acid - such as corn, soy, canola, peanut, etc...

This last, linoleic acid, is required in the diet in tiny amounts, but in the modern diet is up to 15% of caloric intake, versus 3% in aboriginal diets and most human diets more than 100 years ago. And none of these agents was present in large amounts in diets 15,000 years ago. 

The paleolithic diet was not a single diet and was not constant, but it did have things that were consistently MISSING from it. 

Animal fat, whatever vegans may fantasize, is not one of the missing elements. Animal and saturated fats are not neolithic agents of disease.

And by the way, I am only bothering with this because I highly respect the Atlantic - I'm a subscriber - and I've enjoyed your own market liberal oriented writings therein. But this is a topic Iv'e been interested in as a Doctor for 4 years and I've more than a passing acquaintance with these issues.

read more here: 

http://www.archevore.com/

And it's too late, but you might enjoy this one in particular:

http://www.archevore.com/panu-...

There are some other good comments there by others.

But my favorites are the ones that say things like:  "A cursory review of the abstracts in Google Scholar indicates that this is an open question that is still being sorted out by the experts." How's that for an irrefutable argument? : )