Why do we eat grains? Thermodynamics
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Sure, it doesn't need to be related to the Paleo diet, but that's still where it all stems from. It's the same as any other fad diet or pseudoscience: Come up with some reasonable-sounding claims that take advantage of poor scientific awareness (e.g. 10,000 years isn't enough time for humans to adapt to eating grains, so we should eat like cave men instead), then make millions of dollars promoting your diet and selling books to your unquestioning followers.
There's a common sentiment among Paleo zealots that they finally need to distance themselves from the irrational underpinnings that started the whole fad (see here[1] for a FAQ by the 'Paleo diet' inventor). The problem arises when they go searching for scientific evidence to support their grain bashing, and then we end up with statements like this:
> It can stem from the simple proposition that fruits and vegetables are generally healthier to eat than grains. That’s an argument I’ll cover more deeply in later posts.
Oh, how convenient. Save the crux of the argument for another time. We'll all be patiently holding our breath.
The point you quoted was intended to illustrate that you can lower the ratio of grain in your diet not because you think grains are the devil but simply because you want to eat more of other things. For me, those other things are fruits and vegetables but they could equally be dairy or meat or nuts or legumes or any number of things. Exploring that area felt thematically different and this article was already rather long so I thought I'd save it for another post. Apologies if it seems although I was dodging the issue, possibly I didn't choose my closing words carefully enough.
That's all well and good as long as you give the full story, but you've forsaken the anti-grain diet fads while parroting their mantra almost verbatim. Namely, the idea that grains are a primary food source only because they're an easy source of calories. What about the fact that they're also rich in essential nutrients and have numerous documented health benefits?
When you say this:
> fruits and vegetables are generally healthier to eat than grains.
And then follow it up with this:
> Around 12,000 years ago, a group of Neolithic humans conducted an experiment that forever changed the course of human development. They left behind the way they had eaten for countless generations and moved to a diet that helped them face new problems and evolve in new ways. I believe it’s possible for this generation to do the same.
It's clear you're trying to persuade people to eat fewer grains. Don't get me wrong, I love to re-examine common knowledge we all take for granted as much as anyone, but there are good, scientific reasons people say "eat lots of whole grains" and it seems very odd to condemn them without taking those reasons into account.
The anti-pattern of trying to present both sides as equally valid, probably to maximize advertising revenue or something, is not terribly useful. A sliced apple simply is healthier than a twinkie and a handful of pecans is healthier than a bag of Doritos. If it were theoretically possible to make a healthy grain based diet (I suspect it is inherently not possible, but I will humor the cheetos and chez whiz addicts) then it wouldn't matter anyway because the dominant American grain based diet is incredibly unhealthy. Either way you have to put down the triple quarter pounder with bacon and cheese and step away slowly, and frankly the paleo stuff tastes better than the grain stuff unless you use megatons of the unhealthy meat/dairy/grease/artificial flavors aka the standard american diet. I mean, seriously, given a choice of a lifetime of civil war style hardtack or a platter of grapes, berries, and cherries...
Most of the studies you would find are observational studies made comparing processed grains vs whole grains. It seems obvious between those two choices the option with more vitamins/minerals is going to be healthier.
They aren't rich in essential nutrients. They don't have numerous documented health benefits. And most certainly the reason why we bake bread and eat rice is because of their caloric density and ease of storage of rice and wheat.
A diet void of vegetables (and to a much lesser extent, fruit) is horribly unhealthy. You can't say that about grains. Is it really so unreasonable to postulate that the solution to our obesity pandemic is to remove the dense and less-satiating sources of calories and replace them with fibrous fruits and vegetables that contain many more micronutrients?
Do you have sources for that that don't rely on correlational studies?
Serious question, not snark. I'm curious.
One of the details of that argument is that grains contain phytic acid[1], which humans can't digest. Phytic acid binds with important minerals, such as calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc, making them unavailable when digested. Cows, sheep, goats, and other non-humans produce various phytases, enzymes that digest phytic acid, but humans don't. Some people (such as Marlene Zuk, author of Paleofantasy, recently linked on HN) say that 10,000 years is enough to adapt to a new food, and cite lactose tolerance as an example. But lactose tolerance is the result of a single SNP, which can occur in at least two places. To digest phytic acid, humans would need to evolve a whole new enzyme. You need more than 10,000 years for that.
Despite what the Paleo crowd would have you believe, phytates do have health benefits (like fighting cancer and inflammation). And even if they didn't, soaking and cooking grains reduces their final content of phytic acid. Unless you have a very poorly balanced diet that consists almost entirely of grains, phytates are of no concern at all [1].
[1] http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA400758/Are-Phytates-Bad-or-Go...
10,000 years is totally enough time for evolution to work on humans. See: lactose tolerance.
Just as importantly, we've been evolving the living daylights out of every domestic plant via selective breeding for just as long. Wild potatoes are poisonous, as are almonds. Maize started out with tiny grain. Apples have been bred into a bazillion varieties, with different sizes, tastes, and textures.
It's silly to say that it's more natural to eat cauliflower than corn, when neither properly existed 10,000 years ago.
GP specifically mentioned that and dismissed it with a seemingly reasonable argument; care to respond to that? Besides, most humans are not lactose tolerant as adults. Has there been any research concerning a putative phytic acid tolerance? If so, have we identified a particular set of relevant genes? Have we studied the incidence of these genes in various populations?
I sort of assume that humans can handle most compounds they eat on a regular basis, but it seems that many compounds are harmful when consumed in excessive amounts.
But I do think it is wrong to dismiss lactose tolerance as an example of recent adaption: most adaptations start as a single mutation with a selective advantage. It is disingenuous to claim phytic acid would require "a whole new enzyme", because if an enzyme were evolved specifically to break it down, the way it'd happen is that an existing enzyme would be duplicated (and there's a healthy amount of duplication in the typical genome to start with) and a small number of mutations would specialize this copy for phytic acid. It could be a single mutation on an already duplicated gene; it could be a series of one or more random mutations followed by the final mutation which begins to exert a selective pressure.
But all this is predicated on there being a selective pressure to digest phytic acid. For lactose, there is a strong selective pressure. For diet-related prion disorders (kuru), there is a strong selective pressure. Is there a strong selective pressure to digest phytic acid? Maybe there is, and the adaptation requires too many mutations to reach. Maybe there isn't, and so there is no selective pressure to drive an adaptation.
If I am taking the position that grains aren't that bad, then I am also taking the position that phytic acid -- as it is found in our diets -- isn't particularly bad. Hence, my position must be that there is no strong selective pressure to begin digesting phytic acid, anymore than there is to begin producing our own vitamin C.
A genetic study has found that humans did evolve rapidly in the last 10,000 years, but most of the changes were one-off mutations such as these.
> "(e.g. 10,000 years isn't enough time for humans to adapt to eating grains, so we should eat like cave men instead)"
This is a common claim by paleo supporters, but I don't see it in the article.
If anything the approach is the opposite: carbs are fine, but they are calorie-dense. In an era where we're over-consuming calories it makes sense to start cutting the most calorie-dense (and also least filling) foods first.
As someone who went to Fat Class when he was a kid, this has been accepted practice for dietitians for years. If you're over-consuming, you want to optimize for a balance of the amount of calories reduced vs. the amount of hunger increased. Leaving oneself hungry is the surest way to fall of a diet-change wagon - and cheap sugars give the "worst" combination of fillingness vs. calories consumed (it would be best if we actually needed said calories).
The argument doesn't stem from some pseudoscientific belief that some foods are magically worse than others for inscrutable reasons like inverting the polaron field. It makes its argument from the (typically anti-paleo) stance that all foods are (more or less equal) and calories are the primary concern.
"So you're saying that eating a lot of vegetables, beans and quality meat is good for you? Who would've thought that!" </sarcasm>
"Oh I shouldn't be drinking tons of liquid sugar? Eureka!!" </s>
That doesn't mean that recommendation to cut back on soda should be removed from public health, because obviously there are still far too many people who aren't aware of exactly how and how bad excessive soda consumption is for you.
Also if you're a starving roman legionary living outdoors and marching 15 miles a day thru Gaul and doing hard core military training when not fighting pitched battles then what little wheat and corn you can get will not make you fat, but it doesn't work so well when you eat even more grains despite a lifestyle of sitting in a car for 2 hours a day and then at a desk for 10 hours and then watch TV for 6 hours at home on the couch and for a variety of lifestyle and economic reasons that isn't changing any time soon, although IS feasible you could maybe put down the six frosted filled donuts for breakfast and eat two sliced apples instead...
Don't forget: clean (refined) water, refined medicines, sterile operating rooms. Old doesn't make it better.
I've posted a lot on this subject on HN, but ultimately this isn't something that needs to be debated. Anyone can experiment for themselves. Try eliminating grain (esp. wheat) from your diet for a month or so and see how you feel. If you want to go all out, do a whole30[1]. If you see no benefits, then stop, nothing lost. If you're like me and your weight and cholesterol levels drop, then yay. Debate on this topic is less productive than empirical investigation.
About two months I tried massively reducing the amount of sugar and carbs I consume, and saw good results.
I wouldn't call my diet "paleo" since I'm not super strict about it (I eat oatmeal for breakfast every morning, I take Saturdays off as a day to eat whatever I want, I consume lots of dairy because I'm trying to bulk up and its an easy way to get protein), but even with those relaxed restrictions, I feel way better.
After a week or two of cravings, I don't even want to eat high-carb staples like bread, pasta or rice before - I now see them as just a cheap way to fill yourself up.
Are you suggesting vegetables aren't more nutritious than grains on the whole? Don't get so anti-paleo that you stop thinking yourself. If you were raising a child, would rather he/she eat a plate of vegetables or a plate of rice for a meal?
This is an entirely different discussion than what the article is about, but why are "scholars" assuming those two factors are the only ones to consider? (assuming they actually are, and this assumption isn't years behind the real debate going on among the scientists)
There's evidence suggesting that the first time humans cooperated in groups larger than the default tribe size, it was caused by something completely different: religion[1]. Göbekli Tepe - the oldest known temple in the world - predates agriculture[2]. It wouldn't surprise me at all if religion was the main (if indirect) social driving force behind a lot of these prehistoric changes in lifestyles that resulted in modern human society.
[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328562.100-the-god-i...
Early agriculturalists actually had it much rougher than this article implies for a real kicker of a reason:
Wild plants suck as crop plants.
Maize was domesticated from a bushy grass called teosinte (Agriculture arose independently in the Americas a little later than in the Middle East). Google that and see how closely it resembles the big juicy corn-cobs you're used to. Where corn has giant cobs crammed with hundreds upon hundreds of big juicy kernals, teosinte has a miserly amount of sad, pathetic, and tiny little kernals. You'd have to grow an entire field full of teosinte to equal the output of a small patch of corn. If a modern farmer saw one of his fields being overgrown with teosinte he'd probably spray it with herbicide. If some contagion wiped out all of our crop plants and we had to go back to wild crops we would be absolutely humped as a species. Now, imagine how difficult it must have been to come up with the idea of settling down and growing crops to live on when the crops you could grow were basically weeds!
In fact, teosinte was so far from being a viable crop that some have proposed theories about intermediate steps. For example, consider the Beer (or chicha) theory of civilization! Somehow, somebody discovered that you can ferment teosinte into something that tastes weird and makes you act even weirder. Fun stuff! While teosinte was not a crop you could build a viable farm on, maybe some hunter-gatherers stumbled upon the process of making chicha. At first, collecting wild teosinte would have taken a lot of work. Far too much for the calories yielded. However, they probably had the time for the occasional novelty! Being lazy, these hunter-gatherers probably realized they could scatter some of the seeds they collected in a specific spot, continue their wanderings, and find a much denser patch of wild teosinte in the same spot a year later. They might even have started selecting which seeds to scatter, either fortuitously preferring the smaller ones for flavor or being smart enough to deliberately select the mutants with higher yields to sow for next year. Perhaps the first steps towards agriculture (in the new world at least) were taken by the paleolithic equivalent of frat-boys! Actually, no archaeologist would ever say that. They would instead say, "priests and shamans" used the beer for religious ceremonies. (Hot tip: If archaeologists have no clue what something they find is for, they usually say it has "possible religious significance".) It makes no real difference what their reasons were. In this theory, the selective breeding of teosinte to produce maize can start long before people actually have to rely on maize to supply much in the way of calories. Humankind's urge to get plastered may have ultimately led to civilization!
Wait! There's more! Proponents of this theory have also pointed out that beer solves a lot of problems early civilizations probably had. Take water quality for example. If a lot of hunter-gatherer's with no concept of germs or hygiene were to settle next to a river, you can bet that the river would be pretty deadly to drink out of before too long. Fortunately, if you take some water, combine it with grain and ferment it, the result is a tasty fermented beverage that is safe to drink thanks to the wonders of alcohol! (Early fermented beverages probably had a pretty low alchohol content and packed a healthy dose of calories. Perfect for quenching the thirst and nourishing hard working agriculturalists from dawn till dusk!) I could go on for a while...
TL;DR - Beer, rather than being an evil byproduct of civilization, may be what gave us both agriculture and civilization! Beer is good.
Ham-fisted attempt to tie this back into all-things entrepreneurial: The development of agriculture was a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. You can't have agriculture without crop-plants, but how could we have developed crop plants without agriculture? Beer. Sometimes, something that looks like a total waste of time becomes the foundation of very serious things (TM), such as the whole of human civilization. Thanks to the adderall-fuelled march of progress we now get to see this process play out in a matter of years or even months! Keep your eye on frivolous crap!
Similarly, cheese is probably what allowed the lactose-intolerant humans to transition into lactose tolerance:
http://www.nature.com/news/art-of-cheese-making-is-7-500-yea...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohalo_II
Yes, some folks are riding the "fad train" and profiting handsomely from the current popularity. That is true no matter whether it is a diet, a sports team, or a TV show that is currently en vogue. However, there are quite a few people who are actually focused on the science and evidence behind human nutrition and health.
The best book I've come across that dives into the research and nearly every important epidemiological study in the last 200-300 years is Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes (http://amzn.to/149HYzi). It's not exactly an airplane read and certainly not a "diet" book; however, it completely changed the way I think about nutrition, exercise, disease, and overall health.
I would also recommend anything by Loren Cordain or Robb Wolf.
Before you make any judgments, do the research.
First, the per-acre yields for heritage varietals are much lower than those cited in the article, and I suspect that some crops have improved quite a bit more than others.
Second, I would speculate that grains' biggest advantage in neolithic times was storage duration, not mass or volume. Today if we have a crop-killing drought we can transport crops from other regions. It's expensive and inconvenient but not often life threatening. Even as little as a couple hundred years ago, any society dependent on agriculture would need a crop that could be stored for multiple years to protect against drought.
There is an argument that "most people reading this article" shouldn't be taken in isolation from the rest of the world. The market for food is global. And there is (according to the UN) a worldwide food shortage[1]. Certainly, (inflation-adjusted) food prices now way higher than at any point between 1990 and 2007 (though down from peaks in 2008 & 2011)[2].
If demand from first world countries shifts to lower-calorie-per-unit-area foodstuffs, eventually the global cost of a calorie's worth of food will increase, exacerbating any food shortage. (Whether that is a good reason not to move away from grains is a matter for debate -- see the endlessly rehashed arguments whenever someone brings up food shortages as a reason to be a vegetarian).
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/oct/14/un-...
[2] http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesind...
http://familyfarmalliance.clubwizard.com/IMupload/SalemRepor...
Lunch demands bread, because trying to get 500 calories without a starch is hard and imbalanced. For example, eating 500 calories of meat is about 50 grams of fat (your done for the day). Eating 500 calories is 10 oranges and a stomach ache. For the modern day, its not thermodynamics, its because grains balance our diets.
This too is very much a corner stone of Paleo and the proof is in a lot of ancient cultures, especially cultures that had to survive through all four seasons.
Because that's ALWAYS where food articles lead when the hosting domain contains the word "supplements." It's like a 100% probability.
Its fundamentally a warrior food. You can't conqueror the known world feeding your legions apples. Wheat, yes, but not pine nuts or oranges.
Sometimes you see this in opposition to non-grain diets, its part of our long warrior/military tradition, etc etc. You can't have a long term ancient empire without some kind of grain, otherwise you end up something like Ghengis Kahn starving horde has to go home. No not the guy Kirk yelled Kahhnn! about, the much earlier one.
Which reminds me. Don't you find it funny how some the most important things to have occurred in history came from the most random places, times and humble beginnings? I find the fact that such little, seemingly innocuous, random events go on to have such an enormous impact upon billions of people centuries into the future absolutely fascinating.
For example have you ever wondered what effectively helped end the need for slavery and in turn paved the way for women's rights? The steam engine. Weren't expecting that now then were you?
History is random like that.
Also, citation on the steam engine bit? Slavery was illegal in much of the world by the time we developed machines to automate picking of cotton or harvesting other crops, which is where (I believe) most slave labor was used. (afaik inventions like the cotton gin did little to alleviate the demand for slaves).
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/energyhall/page88.as...
And inventions like the cotton gin may have increased demand for slaves, because they enabled more cotton to be grown.
Combined with the fact that one of the primary applications of the steam engine was faster transportation of goods in the North (South had little in the way of industrialization until post Civil War), I'm almost certain that the steam engine did not decrease the need for slaves. Once the North began expanding European trade routes post War of 1812 and the entire continent started demanding Southern US cotton, it was an avalanche (that did not get tempered by the ban on international slave trading).
Amazingly it took until 1950 for mechanized harvesting to take over. Kinda delicate! Processing is simpler and that was figured out and deployed widely around 1800. Processing cotton means pulling the seeds out. Otherwise your tee shirts would sprout if you get sweaty. Well not seriously, more like the spinners and looms would jam.
Old days: hand pick cotton, hand process.
1800-1950: hand pick cotton, run thru a steam powered Whitney (dudes last name) gin to process
1950-today: Rust (dudes last name) cotton picker, electric motor powered (well, mostly) Whitney cotton gin. Not much use for human hands anymore.
Now indirectly OP was kinda correct in that "the world" could tolerate plantation like treatment of poor blacks up to 1950 or so as long as it stayed away from "the world". But once all those poor blacks were unemployed and moved out into the world in factories and stuff, you can't ignore it as easily. So yeah mechanization (in the 1950s not steam era) led directly to blacks sitting on city busses goin' to factories instead of picking cotton on the neo-plantation and not feeling that sitting in the back of the bus was cool anymore, which led directly to civil rights protests and indirectly to the womens movement and all that.
Ops details were all wrong but general message was completely correct. The gin resulted in lots of black people picking cotton where they got abused and pretty much no one saw or cared, the Rust picker (and WWII) resulted in them being unemployed and moving to factory jobs very much in the public eye, where the abuse became unignorable.
http://www.voxeu.org/article/why-china-missed-industrial-rev...
"Whereas entrepreneurs in Europe were very eager to develop new technologies that increased labour productivity via the capital-labour ratio, Chinese businesses barely had any incentive to do so. "
Early steam engines were not terribly powerful and not terribly efficient compared to a miner water bucket brigade, but they were incredibly volume efficient "down hole" and if you're a mining company your coal is "free" unlike trying to use draft horses which require food and more people than the steamie required.
Volume efficiency is important before dynamite theres no really easy way to make holes (and even after dynamite, that stuff isn't cheap, Nobel got his prize money selling it you know) so making all mine holes twice as big to hold a bucket brigade isn't going to happen.
These guys fought slavery because they knew it to be profoundly immoral.
There seems to be a bias in human cognition that expects like to come from like. So if something is significant we feel that it must have originated from something... not insignificant seeming.
Once you recognise the bias it's surprising how often it comes up.