Famiglietti's diet

As you get older your body/stomache makes less and less digestive enzymes, by age 50 sometimes you are making 90% less than you did when younger.

The Paleo Diet makes the logical fallacy "post hoc ergo propter hoc," which, for those of you who didn't just take a rhetoric class and have the definition fresh in your brain, means the mistake of assuming that something happened "After this, therefore (it happened) because of this."

So cavemen didn't die of cancer or heart disease, eh? True, true. But that's because most of them died of infection and accident-related trauma.

You break your arm at age 10 now, you go to a hospital and it gets set and you're fine. You break your arm at age 10 then, its clumsily set at best, heals funny, you can't work a spear as well as others, and you either starve or get killed by something because you couldn't defend yourself.

It's true, heart disease and cancer and other diseases are largely diseases of affluence that effect people in developed countries where crappy food is readily available. But don't sit there and act like french fries are the only thing separating us from a 130 year lifespan.

No one is arguing that fast food is healthy- but it's not poison. A burger once a week isn't going to kill you in the long run or short run. Now, if you eat nothing but burgers and fries and never do anything physical- ok, there's an issue. But I'm pretty sure you could become fat and unhealthy eating tons and tons of caveman food and never exercising just as easily as eating lots of pasta and other "agricultural" foods.

Unhealthy foods are like cigars or alcohol- ok, sure, if you go to town on them, it's not good for you. But a cigar on New Years or a couple beers after a long run or the occasional Big Mac isn't going to take years off your life.

Is fam still getting lots of infections or is his immune system working better on his new diet.

junk food wrote:

I agree it said he couldnt run 1/2 mile that is not because you are eating pizza instead of whey powder.

I certainly agree with this notion.

Fam changing his diet = good.

I don't even think its a stretch to say it made him a couple ticks better as a runner.

But he didn't turn into some super human or something. He was good in 2007 and he was good in 2008. He raced a touch less in 2008. That probably helped him more than a few carrots. Now that he has raced his ass off this year: we'll see how fast his brocoli has him running at nats and beyond.

I cannot believe we are actually debating whether or not a bad diet could hurt the performance of a 30 yr old runner...

If you are over 30 and can run successfully on pizza and mcdonalds, then more power to ya. Most people can't do this...

Alan, you at least ought to do a little work, if that's not asking too much. Do you want to see the names of some scary sounding foods? You should stay away from this stuff.

Brassica oleracea

Cynara cardunculus

Zea mays

Pretty scary sounding chemical names, huh? Ooooohhhh. You may know them better as broccoli, artichokes and corn.

So you say "that artificial preservatives are notoriously bad for your health," and since most people eat very little from their garden, they must be eating these preservatives for decades. Doesn't it make you wonder how this can be so yet americans live longer and longer?

Grok wrote:

For Christ sake Arch, are you a paid lobbyist for McDonald's?? If you can't agree that eating things that you can't pronounce and have to be abbreviated isn't natural, then there's no way you can understand what I want to tell you about proper nutrition. While I don't completely agree with all of the principles in the book Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain, it's an eye opener. Read it and then tell me about how great all of the 'modern' foods are. And when I say modern, I mean anything that wasn't available 10,000 years ago when the agricultural revolution began. Odd how modern diseases began shortly after. I'm out of this one, good luck reasoning with him.

Thanks for the effort Alan, you're more ambitious than I.

When you try to claim that potatoes, wheat and beef are poison, you not doing well in the debate. I understand why you would want to distract from your shreded arguments by suggesting I'm corrupted by the McDonald's corporation. I'm not, but if I was it wouldn't confirm or discredit my arguments.

If you want to emulate paleo-man whose life expectancy was about 30 years, I fully encourage you. I prefer to live in the present and resist an irrational fear of technology.

The problem with Fam's diet isn't that there's some deadly poison in McDonald's or pizza, it's that if you never eat fruits or vegetables at all you're gradually depleting your body of many nutrients it needs. This, combined with intense training, could lead to a gradual crash into exhaustion and poor performance.

It's not necessary to argue that there's some toxic chemical secretly hidden in quarter pounders with cheese.

antibiotics and celiac wrote:

I cannot believe we are actually debating whether or not a bad diet could hurt the performance of a 30 yr old runner...

If you are over 30 and can run successfully on pizza and mcdonalds, then more power to ya. Most people can't do this...

That is the conventional wisdom, but Fam is a huge counter-example. Here is someone who actually tried it. 10 years is a very long time to be performing at world-class levels when your diet is considered disasterously unhealthy by most people. I'm not recommending Fam's old diet to anyone, but his story should at least make an objective person question the conventional wisdom.

Grok wrote:

Sure, some athletes eat like crap and get away with it. Eating at McDonalds tonight isn't going to negatively impact your race tomorrow or next week. The only way it would is due to your body holding an extra 5 lbs of water due to the outrageous sodium content of the junk food. Most American diets are so high in sodium already that they don't notice the effects of a high sodium meal...the water weight is already built in.

if your kidneys work, you'll pee it out. long term it raises sodium because your body gets used to those levels. one meal....you'll pee it out.

So take a multi vitamin with your soda and probably you will be OK.

I drank 4 beers and ate pizza with a 2:14 marathoner runner this week.

Arch Stanton wrote:

Alan, you at least ought to do a little work, if that's not asking too much. Do you want to see the names of some scary sounding foods? You should stay away from this stuff.

Brassica oleracea

Cynara cardunculus

Zea mays

Pretty scary sounding chemical names, huh? Ooooohhhh. You may know them better as broccoli, artichokes and corn.

So you say "that artificial preservatives are notoriously bad for your health," and since most people eat very little from their garden, they must be eating these preservatives for decades. Doesn't it make you wonder how this can be so yet americans live longer and longer?

Doesn't prove anything. Americans live longer not because of nutritional habits, but because of modern medicine allowing us to sustain some kind of life despite our horrible eating habits and chemicals we are forced to eat.

The best we can do is try to AVOID as much of this stuff as we can. Not eating at McDonalds and other fast food joints is a good place to start.

I really can't believe there are people on a running board, who really should be more healthy, arguing that there is nothing wrong with eating fast food.

Kids.

Alan