Is fiber the new Paleo?
By Jay Wiener
Founder & CEO, WeightZone Factor
Paleo, the most popular diet of the decade, sounds simple: if you eat the way our cavemen ancestors did, you’ll lose weight and be healthier. Just one problem: no one knows what caveman ate. The people who created the Paleo Diet guessed, and they were wrong. How do we know? By studying the fiber in Paleo Poop.
We have evolved considerably since the days when orange-haired cavemen roamed the planet, clubbing animals and insulting other cave families with primitive language: “Huge”, “Loser”, and “I’ll make Mexico pay for the Wall.” (Apparently, caveman eating habits have evolved but their vocabulary hasn’t.) We have evolved (and continue to evolve) more rapidly than expected, in part due to our new, expanded food sources. (Note: I think that the lack of orange hair in all but the most primitive primates is definitive proof of evolution, but that is a topic for a different post.)
What is a Paleo Diet?
People on a Paleo diet eat fruits, vegetables, lean meats (preferably grass-fed or wild), seafood, nuts and seeds, and healthy oils. They avoid grains, dairy, processed foods and sugars, legumes, starches and alcohol. However, at least two major changes have occurred since the Paleolithic days:
- Modern humans eat just a small fraction of the fiber that our ancestors ate.
- Our gut bacteria have changed dramatically.
If you want to diet successfully, you’ll need to account for both of these changes.
How did the Paleo Movement start?
Paleo doesn’t account for any of these changes, but we can. Let’s build a better Paleo Diet based on what scientists have learned in the thirty years since S. Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner wrote the article that touched off the Paleo movement (yes, that was an intentional Paleo Poop Pun. There might be more.)
Appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 1985, “Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications” argued that the human body is “genetically programmed” to run, not on a modern diet, but on the foods consumed by our Stone Age ancestors.
“The human genetic constitution has changed relatively little since the appearance of truly modern human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens, about 40,000 years ago,” they wrote. The authors reasoned that our digestive process has been shaped by several hundred thousand years as hunter-gatherers, not by the brief 10,000-year span since the advent of farming. Meat, probably lots of it, as well as fruits and vegetables were Paleo-friendly. The staples of agriculture—breads, grains, dairy, starches, legumes and alcohol—were not. Processed foods and refined sugars–very modern inventions–were also excluded.
However, the authors’ basic assumptions about what our ancestors ate and what has changed since then were wrong. This doesn’t mean that the Paleo Diet doesn’t work; it is spectacularly successful for those few people who (A) adhere to its stringent rules and (B) center their diets on fruits and vegetables, not protein. However, this Spartan regimen is unnecessary.
Paleolithic cavemen were humans. They weren’t quite Homo Sapiens, but (like members of Congress) they were close. And cavemen were smart, resourceful omnivores: they ate whatever they could find (again, like members of Congress). If they found a carcass brought down by a large predator such as a lion or bear, and if the carcass was near a fruit tree, the cave family would feast on meat and fruit–and fat, and bone marrow. Unappealing, but surprisingly healthy.
If there wasn’t a convenient carcass to scavenge or a slow-moving animal to kill (like Jeb Bush), and if there were no fruit trees to shake, our ancestors ate whatever they could find: tubers, roots and wild plants of every variety.
True Paleo Diets are Not Possible in the Modern World
Modern humans can live and thrive on a ‘Paleo Diet”, however, they will be living a pseudo-Paleo lifestyle and eating pseudo-Paleo foods. The foods that were available to our ancestors are no longer available to us. The plants are different, the nutrients they contain are different and our populations of gut bacteria have evolved accordingly.
Let’s assume that you want to live the Paleo lifestyle but do not want to move to the Amazon Rain forest and become a hunter-gatherer. Very reasonable. However, you are going to have to purchase your Paleo foods from a decidedly un-Paleo supermarket. At first, shopping will seem easy and healthy; not purchasing processed foods is a terrific start. But you’ll quickly get into trouble: supermarkets do not have any true Paleo foods. None. If you are a dedicated Paleo Puppy but live in a city, you’ll need to become an urban forager and live on coconuts and road kill.
Food has evolved and our gut bacteria have evolved. They are often inferior, compared with both our Paleo ancestors and with modern hunter-gatherer societies (yes, hunter-gatherers still exist in the Amazon and elsewhere). Produce is different, and the meat at the local supermarket comes from poor animals that have spent most of their lives in tiny boxes. It has little in common with the wild game we evolved to hunt or scavenge.
How do we know this? By studying fossilized human feces.
Paleo Poop is Research Gold
Researchers analyzing human coprolites (fossilized paleo poop) have discovered that our foraging ancestors literally ate ten times as much fiber as we do. Skins, husks, seeds and stems–our ancestors ate remarkable amounts of unprocessed produce. The produce contained vast amounts of both soluble and insoluble fiber, which dramatically improved their entire digestive process.
Fiber was a major part of our ancestor’s diets but few modern humans get enough. Everyone worries about getting the right proportions of the three basic macronutrients, protein, fats and carbohydrates, but few people realize that fiber is a fourth, quasi-macronutrient. We do not use it for calories or energy, of course, but that is its main value: it slows down and modulates the digestion of other nutrients as they travel through the intestines, so that the body can absorb and use them more efficiently.
Of equal importance, fiber encourages the growth of healthy colonies of gut bacteria–bacteria that promote healthier digestion and help prevent obesity.
Fiber slows down the absorption of sugar, which is essential for good health. When our Paleo ancestors were stomping around, this carefully regulated absorption of sugar kept them alive and healthy. It allowed their bodies to store some sugar for immediate energy and to store the rest as fat, for future periods of starvation. Unfortunately, in the modern world, where apples have been replaced by apple juice and bananas by banana daiquiris, a diet high in refined sugars can overload the pancreas and ultimately cause Type II diabetes.
Smarter Paleo: Eat More Fiber, Not Just More Meat
First, the bad news. You can’t simply take fiber supplements or fiber-enhanced processed foods; that will help your bowel function but not your pancreas.
Now, the good news. To strengthen your insulin mechanism, improve digestion and lose weight, you simply need to eat a variety of produce with most meals–unpeeled, unprocessed and pretty much unchanged from how it was harvested. Yes, eating fruits and vegetables is boring advice, not a miracle cure, but it works. Miracle cures never do.
Too many Paleo people try to diet by eating massive portions of meat–often fatty meat. Wrong. They should eat massive quantities of fiber and reasonable portions of healthy protein with most meals. (Why ‘most meals’ and not ‘every meal’? Because no one is perfect.)
A plant-based, protein-centric program that includes legumes, dairy and whole grains (not just whole grain flour) is healthy. Moreover, it is not the same as merely adding a few fruits and veggies to an old- fashioned Atkins diet, which is what most Paleo adherents do.
Better Long-Term Solutions
Several recent diet books offer a more intelligent approach using many (but not all) of the Paleo principles, and they are much easier to follow. I particularly admire a book I’m reading now, The Fat Chance Cookbook, by Dr. Robert Lustig and Chef Cindy Gershen. (Lustig is the brilliant pediatric endocrinologist who alerted the nation to the dangers of fructose; Gershen is the founder of The Wellness City Challenge.)
The Fat Chance Cookbook, a follow-up to Lustig’s NY Times best seller, Fat Chance, gives a simple explanation of the obesity epidemic. It offers a diet that is quite similar to the one I follow and it has wonderful, easy to follow recipes.
Long-time readers know that I often disparage gimmicky diet books that promise magic weight loss solutions. Gimmicks never work; hard work and a plan for success do. The Paleo Diet, as sold to us in books, articles, lectures, protein supplements, etc., is a gimmick. Part truth, part chest-beating fantasy. However, if you keep the valuable parts and ignore the inaccurate, orange-haired nonsense, you will develop a diet that you can live with for life.
About Jay Wiener
Jay is both a professional mathematician and a humorist–a rare combination. After maintaining a 100+ pound weight loss for many years, he created a popular diet and fitness blog that makes wellness fun. It has helped countless people to lose weight and get healthier.
Jay is also the developer of WeightZone, a free algorithm that predicts a healthy zone of weight based on body stats, health history and exercise history. WeightZone has replaced the standard BMI and is considered to be the most accurate healthy weight guide available online.
To find your perfect weight and subscribe to his blog (to receive a free sample of his work), visit WeightZoneFactor.com.
The views and opinions of guest authors do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Full Circle.