> And yet Perlmutter argues that his recommendations are not radical at all. In fact, he says, his suggested menu adheres more closely to the way mankind has eaten for most of human history.
The human race has had an extremely varied diet based on geography, and even today doesn't really have a standard diet. (Sidenote: this is also the major flaw with labeling of diets like this as "paleo:" there was no "paleolithic" diet. Yes some populations ate about 50/50 meat, fruits and vegetables, but few of today's agriculture resembles that available even 20k years ago, so using that as justification is weak).
> Perlmutter says we need to return to the eating habits of early man, a diet generally thought to be about 75% fat and 5% carbs.
He gets more specific here, but he gets even more wrong. There are some populations who had a diet of up to 95% carbs.
> “Perlmutter uses bits and pieces of the effects of diet on cognitive outcomes — that obese people have a higher risk of cognitive impairment, for example — to construct an ultimately misleading picture of what people should eat for optimal cognitive and overall health,” St. Catherine University professor emerita Julie Miller Jones, Ph. D., told the website FoodNavigator-USA.
This is the biggest issue with the article. Perlmutter (or at least the journo covering him) does not do a good job of untangling obesity's and caloric intake's effect and the effects of wheat specifically.
> Further research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August showed that people with even mildly elevated levels of blood sugar — too low to register as a Type 2 diabetes risk — still had a significantly higher risk of developing dementia.
Blood sugar does not necessarily come from ingesting sugar, it also comes from fat.
> “This low-fat idea that’s been drummed into our heads and bellies,” Perlmutter says, “is completely off-base and deeply responsible for most of our modern ills.”
He's almost right here: the idea of low fat diets is stupid. We should focus much more on food quality and overall caloric intake.
> “People are getting to this place of understanding that their lifestyle choices actually do matter a whole lot,” he says, “as opposed to this notion that you live your life come what may and hope for a pill.”
Yes. Good.
> "The exact parts of the brain that allow people to become addicted to narcotics are stimulated by gluten,” Perlmutter points out.
Oh come one. Gluten and EVERY OTHER FOOD.
> “Nutrition matters,” Perlmutter says. “The brain is more responsive to diet and lifestyle than any other part of the body and until now it’s been virtually ignored. We load up on medications when our mood is off, we hope for an Alzheimer’s disease pill when we get older. I submit that we need to take a step back and ask, ‘Is this really how we want to treat ourselves?’”
Absolutely.