Friday, May 3, 2013

The Raw Primal Diet is Not the Paleo Diet...

Thanks again to Aajonus for wise, health-promoting insights! I owe him full recovery from lifelong eczema.

Best,
Bonny S.
http://www.onwingsofcare.org/

[The following message is from Bonny regarding a video'd interview TEDxOU called Debunking the paleo diet, in which Christina Warinner is interviewed]


Her premises do not coincide with those of Aajonus who advocates a raw Primal Diet (R) -- but it may describe the diets she is refuting, I don't know for I don't know about those diets.

The [raw Primal Diet of Aajonus Vonderplanitz] certainly does not eschew green vegetables or fruits; in fact, it considers them vital,and advocates juicing of vegetables, as their mineral and other content is sooo good for us.

She [Ms. Warinner] also misses the very very important point that it is RAW protein that is advocated, the raw feature is critical. (Again, I refer to Aajonus's raw Primal Diet, not to these diets that she is refuting.)  This applies to both meat and dairy/eggs.  

The raw Primal Diet also emphasizes all kinds of meats and all organs, not just beef muscle (which she calls the "meat myth.)

Teeth are part of the argument. Stomach acid and intestine length is also important.

I'll listen to this when I can hear the whole thing, but I caught these features in the first few minutes.

There is no question in my mind, looking at this speaker, that she eats much cooked food, including grains.

Thanks for sharing this!
Bonny S.

2 comments:

Jim Ellingson said...

What a shame that people like this spend years studying and debunking myths that are wrong but never look at what is right!
Diane M.

Paleophil said...

Hi Jim,
Warinner's alleged "debunking" of Paleo diets is largely a bogus straw man. Most versions of Paleolithic/evolutionary nutrition allow or even promote more vegetables and organ meats than most Americans eat today (including Mark Sisson's, whose book she displayed and of which she shows no evidence of having actually read--his response is here: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/apoe4-allele-jet-lag-tedx-paleo-debunking-cough-drops/#axzz2SQ49UzlC). She clearly did not do her homework before lecturing people on the topic. It's not the worst critique of Paleo, but it's far from the best.

On the bright side, it provided free publicity to the approach and showed that it is seen as a sufficiently formidable threat to current dietary dogmas to warrant publicly attacking it.

Below are some comments (with some text edited out for brevity) about her lecture from the blog of archaeology researcher and Paleo dieter Miki Ben-Dor at http://www.paleostyle.com/?p=2143 that include an interesting anecdote about raw meat that might interest you.

Regards,
Phil

"J. Stanton - gnolls.org says:
March 24, 2013 at 7:41 am

I’m puzzled as to why anyone in the ancestral health movement would recommend this video…as you point out, it makes a number of trivially false statements, and provides no takeaways that all of us haven’t been saying for many years.

“For the life of me I don’t see why the cooking hypothesis is so widely accepted among non-archaeologists…” The cooked-tuber hypothesis is popular because Richard Wrangham is good with popular media: he wrote a pop-sci book, and managed to somehow wangle a BBC special, pushing it.

The advantage of such media, of course, is a. a lack of peer review, and b. an ability to present hypotheticals as fact (Catching Fire is full of “must haves”, meaning “There is no evidence for this but I believe it must have happened this way”), enabled by c. failing to mention the corpus of established facts demonstrating Paleolithic meat consumption.

bendor says:
March 24, 2013 at 3:17 pm

I have combed all of Wrangham’s papers and the book looking for evidence that we couldn’t consume enough raw foods 2.5 million years ago. Couldn’t find any. There is a quote of a German paper regarding German raw foodie women who have difficulty getting pregnant on raw diet but we all know these women are mostly if not exclusively vegans. All the other support for this theory comes from “it would have been better if they cooked” or “must haves” as you say.

Here is a nice anecdote: After the Russian revolution, the party sent a comisar to the Northeastern coastal part of Russia to open a school for the Chukchis, a kind of “Inuit” Russians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukchis). The school served only cooked food and the comisar describe in a book (unfortunately not translated to English but for some reason translated to Hebrew) how difficult it was for the kids to adjust to the cooked food. In fact one day he woke up to discover they have all escaped. When he found them at their homes, some miles away from school, they all confessed that they ran away because they had to eat some raw meat.

J. Stanton - gnolls.org says:
March 25, 2013 at 6:40 am

You have to start with the unshakable a priori assumption that hominins of the time were primarily vegetarian — occasional scavengers at best, who couldn’t possibly have been hunting and killing other animals.

Unfortunately, the evidence has never supported this hypothesis, and evidence in support of Early Pleistocene hunting continues to accumulate.

PS: That’s a fascinating anecdote! I suspect that “raw meat” included organs, marrow, brains, sweetbreads, and other “spare parts” that would not have been served by the “civilized” administrators…making the craving nutritional as well as cultural."