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I imagine most readers of this blog would expect a group of subjects to do better on a Paleolithic diet as compared to a standard American diet, but there are few studies actually making the comparison. One was posted yesterday in the Advance-0nline-Publication section of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition that shows subjects following a Paleolithic diet made major metabolic changes, and made them rapidly

This week sees the publication of yet another study showing the superiority of the low-carbohydrate diet as compared to the low-fat diet. This study, published in the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, demonstrates that subjects following the low-carb diet experience a decrease in triglyceride levels and an increase in HDL-cholesterol (HDL) levels; and that these changes are accompanied by a minor increase in LDL-cholesterol (LDL), which prompts the authors to issue a caveat. Yes, although just about all the parameters that lipophobes worry about improved with the low-carb diet, the small increase in LDL has caused great concern and has prompted the authors to gravely announce that this small increase is troublesome and should be monitored closely in anyone who may be at risk for heart disease. Since most people who go on low-carb diets do so to deal with obesity issues, and since obesity is a risk factor for heart disease, it would appear that this small increase in LDL often seen in those following a low-carb diet could put these dieters at risk. Does it? We'll see.

"One of the problems - if it could be called a problem - in writing this blog and moderating the comments is most readers are pretty intelligent. Occasionally I have the angry vegetarian wander in, take me to task for my errant ways, and, after a comeback or two on my part, drift away to never be heard from again. Thanks to the confirmation bias, this blog pretty much selects against the non-meat eater. So, I tend to forget how many people there are out there who are pretty much clueless about basic nutrition, and how many people there are who bobble through life spouting cliches they've heard along the way as great nutritional truths. Based on the comments I get on this blog, it seems to me that most people are pretty nutritionally sophisticated and reasonable."

"Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain. Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew. In April 1995 an article appeared in the journal Current Anthropology that was an intellectual tour de force and, in my view, an example of a perfect theoretical paper. "The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis" (ETH) by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler demonstrated by a brilliant thought experiment that our species didn't evolve to eat meat but evolved because it ate meat. It was our gradual drift toward the much higher quality diet provided by food from animal sources that allowed us to develop the large brains we have. It was hunting and meat eating that reduced our GI tracts and freed up our brains to grow. As I wrote at the start of this post, the evidence indicates that we didn't evolve to eat meat - we evolved because we ate meat."

Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain. Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew.

"One of the problems - if it could be called a problem - in writing this blog and moderating the comments is most readers are pretty intelligent. Occasionally I have the angry vegetarian wander in, take me to task for my errant ways, and, after a comeback or two on my part, drift away to never be heard from again. Thanks to the confirmation bias, this blog pretty much selects against the non-meat eater. So, I tend to forget how many people there are out there who are pretty much clueless about basic nutrition, and how many people there are who bobble through life spouting cliches they've heard along the way as great nutritional truths. Based on the comments I get on this blog, it seems to me that most people are pretty nutritionally sophisticated and reasonable."

When I wrote the Overcoming the Curse of the Mummies chapter in Protein Power, I wrote mainly about the evidence of disease found in the mummies of ancient Egyptians and correlated this disease with their high-carbohydrate diet. Along with all the material on mummies, which is the part everyone seems to remember, I wrote about a study done in the United States in the 1970s that persuasively demonstrated the superiority of the hunter diet as compared to an agricultural diet, which no one seems to remember. I came across that study a couple of days ago and decided to present it in a little more detail than I was able to in Protein Power. The anthropological record of early man clearly shows health took a nosedive when populations made the switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture. It takes a physical anthropologist about two seconds to look at a skeleton unearthed from an archeological site to tell if the owner of that skeleton was a hunter-gatherer or an agriculturist.

"I've been meaning to post my take on the debate about dietary protein (large pdf) between Loren Cordain and T. Colin Campbell. A reader does it for me."

The Official Web Site of Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades. Advocacy fo low carbohydrate diets.