Screw it, going to try to preempt the standard responses to dietary posts on HN.
a) Yes, obviously fundamentally it all comes down in conservation of energy. But that's also a ridiculously reductionist view that neglects the layers and layers of complexity that overlays that. For example, if you were able to create a situation where a person's diet and exercise levels could be exactly controlled, then yes, we can control a person's weight from first principles, relying only on conservation of energy. But that's not a realistic situation.
b) Just "cutting your carbs" is probably a reasonable piece of advice on an individual scale, and probably a reasonable thing for a person who is worried about their weight/health to attempt. But as the article points out, the carb increase is systemic, and while its certainly possible to address systemic problems from a purely ground-up, individual basis, it's certainly easier to tackle the issue from as many perspectives as possible.
c) Just "cutting out the processed foods" is exactly the same as above
d) Just "try <insert name> diet" is once again probably the same as above, with the added bonus that nearly any diet is probably going to work and generate short-medium term results just by shocking the body, and forcing some level of structured discipline on an individual, especially discipline laced with all the extra goodies of being from "experts" and all the other fun social stuff we work in.
e) Natural obviously does not mean 'better'. However, it's clear that we have adapted for a certain environment, and while we certainly don't need to replicate that environment in it's totality, that does not imply that our current environment is any good at all from any number of perspectives.
f) This does mean that 'paleo', especially the way the that the paleo-diet/lifestyle is marketed is the way to go. Really all we got to go on is that our macronutrient ratio is out of whack. That does not mean that if you're doing paleo, or are considering paleo that you're doing shit wrong. If it's work, its working, but that don't mean it gonna work for everyone.
'Just "cutting your carbs" is probably a reasonable piece of advice on an individual scale, and probably a reasonable thing for a person who is worried about their weight/health to attempt.'
I've been sympathetic to the low-carb explanation, especially because of its hormonal explanations, but, irreducibly, if one goes to cut out a large portion of carbohydrates that implies a number of other significant changes in diet, and there's no particular reason why "what you intended" and "what actually happened" have to line up. While I'm not immediately switching to a protein view as in this article, I'd observe there's no contradiction between "I cut out a lot of carbs and lost weight" and "I lost weight because I increased my protein intake"... one would have to approach the problem with literally clinical precision to precisely balance carb removal with fat increase, with no change in protein intake.
There's also nothing stopping a bit of both from being the case; a protein-deficient diet of over-processed foods starts a process of excessive refined carbohydrate intake, which then causes metabolic syndrome, which results in great apparent improvement if you switch to a low-card diet specifically because of the metabolic syndrome even though it may, technically, be a secondary problem. I'm not advocating for that, but I can't disprove that; it fits a great deal of what we see, it seems to me, it just isn't unique in that way yet.
(My only strong position in this debate is that the current conventional wisdom is wrong, and the Puritan-inspired attitudes about how it's "just calories" and therefore the only acceptable explanations are a shocking degeneracy in the modern human, and also tutt tutt and shame on them, are double-wrong. The real science is interesting, and still surprisingly unsettled.)
Isn't tokenadult a biological implementation of an autoFPR system? ;). His posts are long, well-thought, full of references and appear so quickly that I'm damn sure he's copy-pasting things from his personal Wiki or research notes.
'Paleo' diets have little to do with how primitive man actually ate. Most noticeably due to a wildly different bacterial profile.
Our lifestyle is vary different as is our longevity. Not to mention actual palio diets involved a huge variety of local foods that where generally regionally specific.
Don't forget lack of domesticated food. Pretty much every plant and animal we consume has undergone selective breeding, and many are not even native to our prior environments.
a) Yes, obviously fundamentally it all comes down in conservation of energy. But that's also a ridiculously reductionist view that neglects the layers and layers of complexity that overlays that. For example, if you were able to create a situation where a person's diet and exercise levels could be exactly controlled, then yes, we can control a person's weight from first principles, relying only on conservation of energy. But that's not a realistic situation.
b) Just "cutting your carbs" is probably a reasonable piece of advice on an individual scale, and probably a reasonable thing for a person who is worried about their weight/health to attempt. But as the article points out, the carb increase is systemic, and while its certainly possible to address systemic problems from a purely ground-up, individual basis, it's certainly easier to tackle the issue from as many perspectives as possible.
c) Just "cutting out the processed foods" is exactly the same as above
d) Just "try <insert name> diet" is once again probably the same as above, with the added bonus that nearly any diet is probably going to work and generate short-medium term results just by shocking the body, and forcing some level of structured discipline on an individual, especially discipline laced with all the extra goodies of being from "experts" and all the other fun social stuff we work in.
e) Natural obviously does not mean 'better'. However, it's clear that we have adapted for a certain environment, and while we certainly don't need to replicate that environment in it's totality, that does not imply that our current environment is any good at all from any number of perspectives.
f) This does mean that 'paleo', especially the way the that the paleo-diet/lifestyle is marketed is the way to go. Really all we got to go on is that our macronutrient ratio is out of whack. That does not mean that if you're doing paleo, or are considering paleo that you're doing shit wrong. If it's work, its working, but that don't mean it gonna work for everyone.