CrossFit/PALEO doctor Tim Noakes could lose medical license over FALSE advise

You may or may not be Paleo....but your line of thought seems to be the way a lot of Paleo eaters think/eat.Our early ancestors no doubt ate ANYTHING they could to survive at times...many tribes came from different climates and adapted accordingly.Nowadays most of the world can survive (and likely thrive) perfectly fine on 10-15% of our calories coming from protein....all plant source protein. And finally, I will leave you with this funny (anti-Paleo) video:http://www.popsugar.com/fitness/Paleo-CrossFit-Video-38828062

S. Canaday wrote:

Nowadays most of the world can survive (and likely thrive) perfectly fine on 10-15% of our calories coming from protein....all plant source protein.

Sage,

plant based protein lacks BCAA, which are essential for building muscle. Yes, for a runner who wants to be skinny, that is ok and you can get away with little protein, but for overall health or even muscle building, this is not a good idea.

Also, be careful with plant based proteins: soy will decrease your testosterone levels (ask Ryan Hall about how that feels). Besides negatively affecting performance, this will also harm your reproduction. Unless you don't want to have kids. ;)

Perhaps I should clarify: I'm not taking about taking any extra protein supplements. I'm just talking about just eating things like beans and rice (if vegetarian). Legumes are gold in that currency. Some nuts here and there can also be good. You obviously don't need to eat meat/animal products to get enough protein nowadays. Not even close. And Soy? Yeah, I wouldn't go out of my way to have a bunch of isolates...but a little high quality tofu here and there is totally fine and linked to longevity. Ryan Hall was'n't/isn't vegetarian, was he? Anyway lots of factors for his low-T probably. Muscle milk probably didn't help. Not a good comparison. You mention for being a skinny distance runner you can get away with little protein...but for "overall health" it isn't a good idea? Last I checked if you're running 100mpw you should probably be getting a little more protein than the average, sedentary person (who is also likely overweight)....but in general Americans consume way too much protein on average...much, much more than what is needed by the body. Most good science is looking at 0.8g-1g/Kg of body weight as a decent enough protein intake (and off course the mix/blend of quality amino acids is key for that...the body can pool animo acids though and combine them at later times...which it often does with plant based sources).

Meat Runner wrote:

S. Canaday wrote:

Nowadays most of the world can survive (and likely thrive) perfectly fine on 10-15% of our calories coming from protein....all plant source protein.

Sage,

plant based protein lacks BCAA, which are essential for building muscle. Yes, for a runner who wants to be skinny, that is ok and you can get away with little protein, but for overall health or even muscle building, this is not a good idea.

Also, be careful with plant based proteins: soy will decrease your testosterone levels (ask Ryan Hall about how that feels). Besides negatively affecting performance, this will also harm your reproduction. Unless you don't want to have kids. ;)

a) definitely not true about "plant protein lack(ing) BCAA". Some may pretty low in certain BCAA's, but when one eats a variety of plant proteins, one certainly can get enough for recovery, rebuilding and health. Yes, if you want to be a body-builder, it is a little more difficult to get enough protein for this purpose strictly from plants (compared to non-vegans). leucine may be the most important AA in this regard. However, if one gets enough amino acids (and specifically leucine) from plants sources, muscle building will be equal to a similar amount of AA's from meat sources. Yes, vegan body-builders will almost certainly supplement with plant protein powders, BUT....99% of non-vegan body-builders do the same. A fairly recent study compared a rice protein supplement to whey. When they intakes in the athletes were equal for leucine (which involved a slightly higher total dose of rice protein compared to whey), the hypertrophy results were equal. In summary, one can easily get enough BCAA/EAA's from plant source for health, for recovery from running, or from body building (though some supplementation might be useful, but there is nothing wrong with that in my opinion)

There is no definitive evidence that soy protein lowers T, and most certainly suggests that that is not true. This is an older review, but more recent reviews (that I could not find at the moment) showed the same thing: soy did not lower T in men-

Similar to what I posted before: no negative effect of soy on T levels. This is mostly a myth.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19524224

OLD SMTC SOB wrote:

No one is immune to the ravages of CAD, not even our meat eating ancestors.

That can be tested because the Swedish empire kept meticulous vital records of all its subjects for the past several centuries. Large-scale agriculture is impractical in Fennoscandia because of its latitude and climate. I've seen no comprehensive study but from records I've looked at, a lot of people lived to be pretty old for late medieval, low-tech folks. Fennoscandians still eat a lot of meat, and have among the highest lifespans in the world. The Swedish government now officially recommends low-carb and high fat.

Another thing to consider is until recently, meat was wild-caught and life was difficult enough that it wouldn't make you obese. Plus people ate lots of fish, which there were plenty of unlike today. I have never yet heard anyone say that eating fish will give you a heart attack!

I was actually in Umeå, Sweden just last year (latitude about the same as Alaska)...there were a surprising amount of high carb and vegetarian options. Tons of breads and baked goods.

Also, tons of people commuting on bikes...like it seems like everyone rides bikes and cross country skies and hikes on the trails. No doubt the exercise helps a bit.

But I've never heard of Fennoscandia being considered a "Blue Zone" area like you are implying with longevity....it's like when people say "look at what the Inuits eat (high fat and mostly meat)...and they are super healthy"...but they are not.

Arguing with people about diet is like arguing about religion...it's darn near impossible to change someone's mind/mindset! I guess we all just have to find out ourselves...

Bad Wigins wrote:

Fennoscandians still eat a lot of meat, and have among the highest lifespans in the world.

Source?

Bad Wigins wrote:Another thing to consider is until recently, meat was wild-caught and life was difficult enough that it wouldn't make you obese. Plus people ate lots of fish, which there were plenty of unlike today. I have never yet heard anyone say that eating fish will give you a heart attack!

1) right, meat was wild caught which made it usually much leaner. So paleo people, even when they were eating a lot of meat (which they weren't always) were not heating a high sat fat diet

2) AS you state, one had to work hard to be a hunter -gatherer. This is likely the key to lack of CVD in some hunter-gatherer groups studied: not overeating calories, and lots of activity. Yet paleo-diet-pushers always want to say that eating meat is a key component to the good health of hunter-gatherers. Again, a) not all of these groups ate lots of meat, b) the meat that was eaten was lean, therefore sat fat intake was not high c) these groups expended tons of energy in the pursuit of their diet. Modern man does not live like a hunter-gatherer. So even if the paleo hunter-gatherer diet had lots of meat in it (and how much is in dispute), this is not necessarily a good diet for today's man.

3) while fish intake is likely healthier than red meat intake (and likely healthy period), and n-3 fats certainly have benefits, the whole "inuits ate tons of fish and had NO CVD!" line is a bit overblown.

A) there is definite evidence that these groups DID have CVD even when eating this native diet (I'll post links if you want)

b) it has been recently discovered that these groups had special adaptations to this diet that allowed them to digest/absorb/utilize high amounts of fats/n-3's. Most people don't have this. This tells you a couple things:

1. not every person would do necessarily well on a high fat fish diet

2. this proves that even in more recent times (many of these groups did not start on these diets until more recent eras, not 100,000's of years ago), just like with the lactase enzyme, people can adapt to their diets in shorter amounts of time than some expect. Thus, modern man certainly could have adapted to the more agricultural, higher carb diet that he has been consuming for the last 10-20,000 years.

Meat being wild caught doesn't mean it's less fatty, it means it's hard to get. The Inuit diet has never been known as lean. Once you finally catch the animal, you'll eat the fatty part first.

Livestock domestication creates CVD risk not by growing fatty animals so much as by growing too many of them so the people get fat and sedentary.

As I said before, in most of the world it's simply impossible to get enough energy from vegetable sources without benefit of agriculture. So humans have been adapting to carnivory for hundreds of thousands of years, and to staple herbivory for only a few thousand, and in the case of northern Europeans, only a few hundred. There are still hunter-gatherers around, and most of the world's population still lives in undeveloped or developing countries.

Genetic CVD risks specific to meat consumption would likely have arisen where they resulted in no selective disadvantage, such as highly populous civilizations with little meat available. A high population with limited resources (e.g. mice) creates pressure for short lifespan, whereas low population with plenty of resources (e.g. tortoises) does the opposite.

I would say both. Wild animals exercise more also, and also struggle to get food. Sometimes the ones caught are not the strongest. Farm animals are purposely fattened, and the feed they eat makes them fatter than they would naturally get out in the wild.

Here is a good read for you on the Paleo diet:

Even these authors, who do think that hunter-gatherers from the Paleo era ate a good amount of meat, still conclude the following:

* Sat fat intake was low *~6%

* Fat intake was not particularly high (20-25%, lower than most westerners today)

* Carb intake was not low/much different than today's recommendations (45-50% !)

* Plant intake made up the bulk of calories

* however, protein intake was high 30+ % (as I stated, wild game was much leaner than today's farm raised meat)

* AND..... Fiber intake was VERY high. up to 100g's a day I put that in bold for you, since in the past you have seemed to think fiber is completely unnecessary.

Agreed, but

a) sat fat intake was still low (mainly unsat fats, and lots of n-3)

b) the belief of their lack of CVD is not true

c) they did seem to adapt to this diet, but most westerners probably aren't inuit ancestors

I think both things are factors. See above

Well, veggie-poster-boy Mr. Canaday got a big ole tummy ache pounding down his carbs while carnivore man Jeff Browning dusted him handily at WS100. Browning goes on to Hardrock for 4th in a loaded field and smashed the record for the Western/Rock double. Paleo 2, vegan 0.