Weston Price actually documented the diet of the islanders of the Hebrides. The staple of their diet was oatmeal. So grains are not necessarily bad for you. He has a picture of two brothers. One remained on the island the other moved to London. The islander had perfect teeth and was very healthy. The Londoner was in poor health with rotten teeth.
Oats were more than food. Oat thatch was used for the roofs. Open fires were burned inside and the smoke would percolate up through the thatch. When it was time for a new roof the thatch was spread on the oat fields for fertilizer. Growing the oats w/o the thatch resulted in weak spindly plants while with the thatch they were very healthy.
Different parts of the world relied on different indigenous WHOLE foods.
Weston also described the condition of the soils and the degradation and lack of nutrients. If the soil does not contain the nutrients your food won’t either. It’s been 90 years of food grown on degraded soil. Amerikaans consume almost 40x the sugar that was consumed in 1776. Amerikaans consume more HFCS than any other people on the planet. Amerikaans suffer more heart disease and diabetes than any other country.
Is it any wonder Amerikaans are having the worst outcomes with the SC2 virus?
Fat does not make you fat sugar makes you fat.
Trivia question:what is the largest crop in the world by weight.
One Satoshi for the correct answer. lol
Hari Dass Baba was a yogi in India and disciple of Neem Karoli Baba.
He maintained silence and would communicate with a chalkboard.
He was asked once whether it was more spiritual to eat meat or be vegetarian.
His answer was, " Rules for eating exist when food is plentiful. When food is scarce one will eat anything"
Another Indian sage is quoted as saying “It is more important what comes out of your mouth than what goes in it”
Food for thought
His big conclusion about grains is that they were nearly always sprouted, soaked at least overnight with some liquid from a fermented food added to the soaking water, or made into sourdough before cooking and eating.
Hello Adam Taggart,
The food pyramid you show if very wrong, and in the long term keeping to that diet will cause much damage and premature death. Please educate yourself on evidence-based peer-reviewed literature before posting information like this. A good source for non-professionals is Dr. Greger of Nutrition Facts. Look here:
https://nutritionfacts.org/
Is to lose 25 pounds. Its also to take a long, brisk walk every single day. These lockdowns havent done my health any good.
Are milk alternatives such as unsweetened almond milk still OK? I know it’s not ideal as it’s processed but I switched to it due to having lactose intolerance. From what I’ve read it’s supposed to be lower fat.
I’m surprised that Peak Prosperity keeps banging on paleo diets, despite claiming to be a science-based place. I read the Primal Blueprint book years ago when they did a podcast with Sisson. Paleo diets have no scientific backing. In fact, they fly in the face of the preponderance of scientific evidence. You can lose weight on paleo diets, but you can lose weight on steroids too. Losing weight is not evidence that it’s healthy. And that’s their problem, they are unhealthy. T. Colin Campbell, a nutrition scientist, picks apart the topic in the book The Low-Carb Fraud. Also, nutritionfacts.org has plenty of science material on what constitutes a healthy diet and why paleo is not healthy.
Just because you can raise animals in your homestead and you think that raising animals is part of your idea of regeneration, that doesn’t mean that eating mostly meat and animal fat is the ideal diet. Science can answer that question independently of your pre-conceived notions.
A truly hunter gather model of diet would be extremely healthy. There’s no question about that as samples of arterial images of aboriginal peoples have stunned doctors. They have found older native men and women with completely clean arteries.
There are several differences between “real” hunter gatherers and what is pushed in alot [ but not all ] of the paleo movements;
- The overall volume of meat [ and food ] consumed by real “paleo” hunter gatherer societies is much smaller than what is usually proposed by the modern pseudo paleo movement. Most of their calories come from the “gathering” portion of their lifestyle, and meats are a much smaller percentage of their calorie consumption.
- The animals they consume are wild. Wild game has a different nutritional make up.
- They starve. Long term fasting is a part of the hunter gatherer’s life. They dont always eat. Thats a concept that most modern people cant wrap their heads around. You can go a long, long time without much food. They are only just starting to understand how regular prolonged fasts effect the body and the metabolism.
Weston Price actually documented the diet of the islanders of the Hebrides. The staple of their diet was oatmeal. So grains are not necessarily bad for you. He has a picture of two brothers.
Sure. I know the exact picture you are talking about. And if you examined the calorie intake of the brother who ate oats and was healthy, you would see 1) there was low/moderate grain caloric intake, and b) he ate lots, lots, lots of other nutrient rich foods. We moderns eat gobs of food, and most of it grain-based. Why moderns are so fat.
The problem Price found is that our diets pushed out nutrient dense foods by eating grains and other nutrient-low foods, not that grains are some sort of poison we can’t eat at all. We actually eat rice and oats in moderation (but always alongside eggs or wild salmon or wild game heart/liver/kidney or wild game bone marrow).
Losing weight is not evidence that it’s healthy.
One of the things that makes me laugh is people talking about dieting, or calorie restriction. We eat 2 huge meals a day, as much as we want, with lots of meat, fat, fish, veg, eggs, and minor nuts/grains/legumes, and always full and never hungry during the day and night (except on Friday when we go down to 1 meal, but even that doesn’t make me very hungry anymore). There is simply no question paleo works great; my whole family is lean and muscular and has great medical numbers (BP, glucose, HR). But a decade ago eating grains/milk/fruits we were constantly sick and fat. There is simply zero doubt. The best health metrics to look at is height/weight ratio and how athletic one is (1 mile running speed, squat/deadlift/bench weights). Just look at Adam’s pictures - they tell the whole story.
1. Most of their calories come from the “gathering” portion of their lifestyle, and meats are a much smaller percentage of their calorie consumption.
Not the Eskimos; they are like 90%. We have found we can eat as much meat/eggs/fish as we want with zero issues. Many years of data, double-digit fam. Meat/eggs are the key. I do agree if one eats rich carbs caloric restriction is kinda necessary, so we don’t do that.
2. The animals they consume are wild. Wild game has a different nutritional make up.
Agree with this for sure. All our meats/fish are wild game only (we spend a lot of time harvesting), plus we grow a garden and seek our own eggs for this very reason. Yes, many can’t do this, but they can go in for their own cow or pig they feed themselves plus eat the marrow/organ meat. It can be done.
3. They starve. Long term fasting is a part of the hunter gatherer’s life. They dont always eat. Thats a concept that most modern people cant wrap their heads around.
We solve this two ways: two meals a day gives our stomachs time to rest without ever feeling hungry (high fat diets satiate). Also, we fast 1/week (in a minor way). It works with very little discomfort. It’s actually best not to “starve” but to just give the stomach a rest and burn any fat one has that day. Once getting used to this, it’s not even noticeable.
One doesn’t need to guess about nutrition. Like Adam, you can see it in your mirror, bench press weights, running times, and medical numbers (heart rate, glucose, etc.). There is simply zero doubt.
what diets are ‘science based’? depends on whose ‘science’. For several years I went into a deep dive of nutrition ‘science’ and tried to get to the sources of various points of view and where their original ‘data’ sets came from (not always easy). There is so much observer bias, merging of correlation/causation, selective data (basis for Mediterranean diet) and outright fraud (usually commercially beneficial to someone), that few generalization hold water. For me, Micheal Pollen’s books get the closest to balancing things. Medical buy in of the high fat anti cholesterol mantra does not get my vote, but most practitioners have drunk the cool-aid.
I like to say ’ figure out what you like to eat, and then find a study to justify it’.
We make our own. It is super easy. All you need is a blender. Soak the almonds overnight or longer. Blend it up, strain it and voila. We eat the pulp as well . You can add some cacao powder or cocoa for some flavor and added nutrition. Or add some vanilla.
Agree. First off, using a food pyramid is a very poor choice. How does this symbol in any way reflect the biology of the real? (Totally appropriate for a discussion about central banking and control of human consciousness though). Second, the before and after pics, uhg!!! Felt like like the commercial birth of the Geico caveman and Weightwatchers baby. Sorry to be critical, but how does a sample size of one and static photos taken years ago reflect your current reality. How bout a pic from yesterday. As far as our strategy here in rural central New York. Mostly Whole Plant Based. Little bit of local ag animal meat and wild game. There’s just no way we can afford to have animals as our number 1 food source when we’re surrounded by so many edible plants. Problem is don’t know what’s edible. And of course as another post mentioned, fasting!!! At least one day a week. Other tips, breath through your nose, easy and slow and deal with those Adverse Childhood issues. But by God Food has to be majority local
I’ve noticed over the years is that optimal diets are quite unique to each individual. Personally, my food pyramid has non-GMO vegetables on the bottom as most abundant with meat much higher up. Interestingly, I feel stronger, more alert etc… on a high plant-based diet than I do on high meat; the exact opposite of the pale anemic vegetarian stereotype.
Regarding the app, my personal feeling is that using some app is just that much more staring into the phone while recording all your personal information and sending it to the corporation. If your diet is natural to you, why on earth do you need that? The reason I bring this up is because the path to freedom, I think, will be having at least some aspects of your life outside of all the surveillance, but that’s maybe a topic for a different forum.
c) hhe made an interesting comment above somewhere about microbial populations. Interestingly, two people can have the exact same diet with one personal getting fat on it while the other is lean. These observations have been done with mice as well and it has everything to do with the pre-existing microbial populations that have been built up in your system over time. The more you can get away from processed foods the better chance you have at a healthier microbiome. What would high fructose corn syrup, glyphosate and yellow dye #5 have done with the caveman digestive system?
Inuits have terrible overall health and a shortened lifespan.
Peak Prosperity is supposed to be about researching the science and changing behavior when understanding changes.
I’m not seeing a preponderance of that here.
As mentioned here, nutrition facts.org does a great job of organizing research in the field of nutrition. It’s an excellent place to start, when you want to research a specific subset of nutritional science research.
Adam dude, show your late-30s belly! I was overweight-to-obese in my mid-20s, I decided to change it by simpy eating less and less… over several months I lost the belly fat but also lost a lot of muscle (a sub-optimal method of, as you put it, “deprivation and [slight] suffering”). This was before I got educated and took control over my own health by reading the best doctors and health information sources in the world such as Dr. Mercola and NaturalNews. The simplest way to do it is simply to quit carbs. Counting calories is useless in comparison. Eliminate bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, legumes, soda (i.e. liquid sugar, the worst offender), etc, by slowly replacing them with other things, either keto alternatives or simply by increasing healthy fats (i.e. saturated fats contrary to the fake advice from the pharma-controlled medical system, healthy monounsaturated fats like unheated olive oil, avocado, eggs, and omega-3 polyunsaturated fats from small/non-contaminated fish like sardines or krill oil supplements), healthy proteins (organic animal products), and non-carby vegetables and (non-sweet) fruit (unless you have digestive troubles and can’t tolerate fiber). Research keto eating, you don’t really have to go full keto (i.e. extremely low-carb diet), you just have to transition to a low-carb diet. Going keto is the extra mile, I did it for a couple of months but it got a bit boring and time-consuming.
Sweetness can be replaced with the healthy sweeteners: erythritol (a sugar alcohol like maltitol/sorbitol/etc but without any GI distress), stevia, and monk fruit. Beware the other sugar alternatives: aspartame is the worst one with effects like MSG+formaldehyde (also found in vaccines), sucralose will destroy your microbiome (do not drink it as those are massive doses), others cause annoying GI distress as mentioned.
Agreed with Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint, only replace mercury-containing and fish-burping fish oil with krill oil. If milk is hard to quit (as a northern European I grew up with milk but it still wasn’t hard to quit it for years), try to find A2 cow milk over A1, or better yet transition to goat milk as it doesn’t have the nasty opioidergic and membrane-damaging inflammation-causing casein proteins. It took me several months to get used to the taste, but I now prefer goat milk. Non-organic goat milk is also often of an acceptable standard, unlike non-organic cow milk. Almond and other non-soy vegetable milks are also ok if you sweeten them with stevia/etc, although personally I avoid the ones with high amounts of rock (calcium carbonate).
Many people think fruits in general are healthy, but in reality today’s fruits are far sweeter than they should be and the fructose they contain literally acts as a “fat storage switch”, because fruits used to be available only during summer so our bodies (which are essentially unchanged since 11,000 years ago when we invented agriculture) adapted to storing the excess energy as fat in order to more easily survive the winter.
And then there’s FASTING. It’s incredibly easy and extremely beneficial to skip breakfast or dinner. That’s already called intermittent fasting, and it has extreme health benefits, by allowing your digestive system to rest and to have very stable glucose and insulin for longer periods, allowing other healing/repair processes to activate. Ever ate a lot shortly before bedtime and then woke up far from refreshed? I find that if I haven’t eaten several hours before sleep, I’m at the point where I can get away with 4-6h sleep easily. Nonetheless I usually skip breakfast and eat 1-2 meals a day, usually only dinner and later a small extra meal (or double-dinner when we have cannabis ;). You can also do it in reverse (eat breakfast, skip dinner). You can even “cheat” or “boost” your fasting benefits by combining it with sirtuin activators like pterostilbene (calorie restriction mimicker). The very idea that one needs 2000 calories a day seems designed to cause disease. It’s about nutrients and metabolism efficiency, not about calories.
But also movement in general. Exercising 20min hardcore burns far less calories than slightly moving for 6h a day. If you sit at a desk for many hours like me, use the 20-20-20 rule (every 20min get up and move for 20sec while looking at objects 20m away), to preserve your figure and agility as well as your eyesight. A couch is even worse than a desk, don’t sit for more than 20min at a time. As you’ve probably heard, sitting is the new smoking, so move, move, move. After just simply moving, try to do exercises of each type: stretching (e.g. yoga, pilates), weight-bearing (lifts, pushups), aerobic (running, walking long distances, swimming, various fitness programs), and anaerobic (HIIT, anything high-intensity).
So diet, anti-diet (fasting), and movement are the main keys.
Reduction of stress is also useful indeed. Exercise, meditation, vitamin C (suppresses cortisol), phosphatidylserine (suppresses cortisol and increases brain function), avoiding stimulants like coffee (reduce dose and/or combine with L-theanine), are some stress-reducing tools. If you have emotion-based low impulse control, have some non-sugar sweets on hand, and quit stimulants (including caffeine and nicotine) and especially GABAergics (alcohol, benzos, etc).
To the nay-sayers/officialists… you can come up with any number of excuses (yes estrogen makes women gain weight in cycles, government-approved “science” says otherwise, etc), but I guarantee you these are the primary factors: by addressing them you’ll lose weight as a byproduct/side-effect of becoming healthy by means of eating a more natural diet. The only things you’re likely to be missing then are magnesium, vitamin D3 (supplement in winter), vitamin K2 (the older you are the more likely you’ll be deficient), maybe vitamin C, and omega-3 if you don’t eat fish or supplement.
A reminder that in the original post above, I say both:
What I’m not saying is that this is the only diet for losing weight effectively. Or the best one. There are a number of other plans that are worth consideration. But I know for sure this one works, which gives me the confidence to share it with you.and
This focus on meat does not mean that vegetarianism and veganism are to be eschewed. There is much evidence for the benefits of plant-based diets — though those on them do need to pay more attention to ensuring they consume enough protein during the day for healthy body function.The key success elements are to avoid nutrient-poor foods that generate an insulin response and/or create inflammation, to eat sensible quantities, and to structure routines and community that will help you stick to your plan. You can successfully achieve these whether on on a paleo/primal diet or a vegan one. (One of my daughters is vegan) So rather than rat-holing on whose approach is the "One True Diet", for someone looking to lose weight and embrace better health, pick any program that:
- avoids sugars and processed carbs
- limits diary and alcohol
- focuses on fresh, whole foods
- is based heavily on local, organic vegetables
- IF it includes meats: focuses on grass-fed/wild-caught/pasture-raised options
I use the before and after photos because humans respond to stories far better than they do data. (I’ve had that lesson reinforced to me countless times over the past decade of running this site…)
They make a topic like weight loss instantly relatable and provide a “Well, if he can do it, maybe I can, too” inspiration that words alone can’t.
So, sorry if they rub you the wrong way. But they’re the most effective arrow in my quiver on this topic.
And if you’re asking for a more recent photo because you’re doubting the sustainability of the approach I’ve laid about above, here’s a video from last week of me deadlifting over 300lbs. Judge for yourself:
For what it’s worth, and that’s not much at this point in the thread, I’ll throw my 2 cents in on the side of the Paleo Dieters. I’m not on a strictly paleo diet, but Adam’s regimen and experience is pretty close to my own. Unfortunately, I didn’t adopt it until I was 58, but the last 9 years have been phenomenal. Within a week I had recovered my declining mental condition, and my joint aches and pains were gone (my hip bad enough I thought I’d need a new one; my finger joints starting that arthritic ache). Within another week my emotional lability was gone and I was left with an upbeat even-temperedness and a restored sense of humor, along with noticeably better energy and overall vitality. Last year, 8 years into this way of eating, I started seeing shades of green and red that have been denied me because of congenital colorblindness. (Yes, I know: that doesn’t happen, but I have had to ask my wife to name colors for me that I hadn’t seen before.) And where I’d been highly protective of my glasses since age 12, now I keep forgetting where I’ve torn them off and laid them down because they don’t focus right, and often go days without needing to find them. (Yes, new eye test coming up, eventually; since I don’t often need them I don’t really care.)
I have a few guidelines, extracted from “Deep Nutrition: Why your genes need traditional foods.” First, two Don’ts:
1 - No oils other than low-temp processed organic coconut, butter, olive oil, homemade lard.
2 - No refined sugars. For a long time, I ate no sugar at all, now I use occasional local organic maple sugar, or Ecuadorian “Just Panella,” which is a whole sugar not nearly as sweet as any other. Still, a very little goes a very long way. This also includes grains and starchy vegetables, which convert to glucose. (In Vermont winters we eat more root starches: our own squashes and potatoes, and some local sweet potatoes: they all usually go into crockpot dishes.)
Plus 4 Do’s
1 - Eat organic, field-raised meat, cooked on the bone, at low temp, with its fat, in liquid. So, mostly crockpot style, although we do smoke and also oven-bake at lower temps. I do use a lot of spices and herbs, and cook very traditional meals garnered from traditional and peasant societies across the globe. Also eggs: we produce our own from heritage breed birds.
2 - Eat offal. I’m not so good here; mostly I include the organs in the bone broths I make (beef, chicken, lamb). All from field raised, organic animals either grown here or sourced very locally, whole or half animal bought at a time.
3 - Eat vegetables fresh and raw. Organic, heritage breed; mostly grown myself, often eaten right out of the field.
4 - Eat fermented foods. We make our own kimchi and kefir. Homegrown or local organic veggies; raw local, organic field raised milk. Until Covid we could get A2-A2 milk at the nearby farmers market, but the dairy is just too far away to justify the smaller quantities we use to make the drive, so we’re using A1-A1 until the farmers market reopens. These ferments also help with the gut biome issue, as does food grown in rich organic soil, and not necessarily washed before eating - since we like snacking while in the garden.
BTW: Oats are not a grain (as some here have categorized it), but a cereal. Unlike grains, oats don’t promote an acidic internal environment, so they’re a better option to minimize inflammation and avoid setting up ideal pathogenic acidic environment. Ditto barley. Buckwheat is a pseudo-cereal, having a lot of cereal like properties. They’re all better options when one just wants some “grain.” Barley cooks up just like rice; we enjoy it on occasion in winter with a beef stew or soup. Quinoa is another nice option, though not my favorite.
We make sure we get plenty of Omega-3 fatty acids by drinking our morning coffee with a tablespoon of healthy butter and 1-2 tablespoons coconut oil stirred in. (Blend it in for a latte-like effect.) That’s also when we have a couple ounces of our homemade Kefir and a couple tablespoons of our homemade Kimchi. We eat no other breakfast. Mid- to late-morning we eat our main meal of the day. Sometimes that’s it for the day, other times one or both of us will want a small helping of something in the late afternoon. Often more main meal; sometimes a handful of nuts or seeds, or some vegetables. We don’t eat from evening till morning about 15-18 hours. We sleep 4-6 hours.
Interestingly, we find that when we’re more active in summer we eat less than in sedentary winter, and usually later, and we sleep less.
I’ve lost 35 pounds; I’m at my high school graduation weight again. Still bald, though…
…may I just point out that gathering food included insects. There’s a lot of protein in them grubs!