Of Mice and Men - Observations on the Paleo Diet

Image credit. Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck. Steinbeck originally titled the novella Something That Happened (referring to the events of the book as "something that happened" because nobody can be really blamed for the tragedy that unfolds in the story). However, he changed the title after reading Robert Burns's poem To a Mouse. Burns's poem tells of the regret the narrator feels for having destroyed the home of a mouse while plowing his field.

My experience with the paleo diet has been all-out positive. But one keeps an open mind, and so my attention was drawn to an article promising to assess the pros and cons of the diet.

The author explains the theory of paleo dieting in rough outlines and discusses the inadmissability of a study that rejects the diet as harmful; the study overlooks that mice are adapted to quite a different dietary niche than are humans.

The author concludes:

One of the most effective ways to test the hypothetical benefits (or detriments) of a particular diet or lifestyle is to try it out on oneself. In 2008 after having read Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories about the science behind the LCHF diet³⁹ and the blogs of many leading PSD advocates, I decided to adopt the LCHF PSD. The results were amazing, coming just short of miraculous.

The first thing I noticed was that I lost some weight on the diet. That wasn’t my intention because I was always skinny. But, I noticed my midsection becoming leaner, going down from a 34” waist to a 30” waist. Moreover, my face became leaner and my eyelids became less “droopy”.

Even more profound were the changes to my cognition and health. Up until then, I had been plagued by frequent bouts of “brain fog”, intense irritability when I was hungry (what folks in the paleo and low-carb communities refer to as “hangry”), and low energy. These symptoms completely vanished and were replaced by a new vitality and clarity of thought. Continual gut inflammation (bloating) disappeared as well.

Perhaps the most amazing result, however, was that after a year on the diet, a heritable genetic condition called erythropoietic protoporphyria (EPP) went into complete remission! Sufferers of EPP experience painful and burning skin when exposed to sunlight. I had always avoided the sun as a result. But, I discovered that not only did my tolerance to sun exposure increase dramatically, the EPP symptoms completely vanished no matter how much sun exposure I received!

It was these dramatic changes that led me to start the Ancestral Health Society with its annual symposium, an academic conference for the discussion of human health and disease from the framework of evolutionary mismatch. I also started the Journal of Evolution and Health (http://jevohealth.com/journal/), of which I’m currently editor-in-chief, for publishing academic, clinical, and popular work on these topics. It also was my motivation to test in a rat model the hypothesis that the processing of foods leads to impairments in mood and cognition.

Of course the news stories everywhere are claiming “Paleo diet shown to be harmful!” Such dramatic statements grab attention, but do more harm than good for improving our scientific knowledge. Adopting an evolutionary framework, based on sound scientific empirical work, is our best way forward to understand human health in the modern world. Evolutionary mismatch theory provides the most powerful framework from which to understand and address the multitude of diseases of civilization that plague us today; not only diet, but other lifestyle factors such as activity, sleep, sunlight exposure and circadian rhythm entrainment, social connections, chronic stress, and access to nature and free play. By adopting the evolutionary mismatch framework, perhaps we can begin to improve our future by recognizing the power of our past.

The source.