Michael Pollan Explains What's Wrong with the Paleo Diet (2014)

Is Paleo "wrong"? Yes. Is it still better than the diet (the word "diet" as in "everything that you eat" not "weight loss food") than most Americans eat? Probably. But then it may be worse in terms of convenience or cost.

I owe it to Paleo, in part, to have resolved some long-standing medical issues that were attributed (at the end of a very long process) to a bad gut flora population. (I had the help of a wicked-smart new doctor who supported my own self-directed lab tests and self-experimentation where conventional medicine had already failed). This was all very much off the beaten path, and while they could look at my gut flora by ordering a stool stool analysis, he said they had very little measure to look at most samples and proclaim one as superior to another based on population). He could say some of these high-level metrics "changed". I really wish I hadn't missed HN's recent discussion on a gut microbiome article.

Paleo got me 90% of the way back to normal health. Yet when it failed, I was left without any explation why. Based on that, I looked for similar diets. I found and experimented with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. The dietary choices turned out to be very close to Paleo, but the rationale was entirely different. And for me, the minor differences were everything.

With strict compliance, it got me over the fence on a consistent basis, but it demanded nothing less than 100% compliance to see those benefits. Setbacks were brutal at first, but eased over time. After half a year, I altered by microbiomd enough to handle a regular diet for days at a time. Yes, your mileage may and will vary.

So even if the basis for the Paleo diet is factually incorrect, I think it resulted in a better answer for some (and certainly not all). It didn't cure my ills, but it gace me a starting point to hypothesize if my food intake was making things better or worse.

My biggest takeaway way that biological experiments can be slow. It took over a month before I saw a gut biome change that allowed for minor cheating on the diet without apparent penalty.