Ok so this is a strange idea. I have been on a ketogenic (low carb, high fat, ample protein) diet for a couple of months. It took me 6 miserable weeks to adapt to it but now I feel amazing. On my last hike in the snow I was able to posthole up to my knees, leading the way without a) getting tired, b) getting hungry. I have what feels like limitless energy. My body now knows how to use fat for fuel, and being 30lbs overweight, I have plenty of it at the ready.

I was hiking with someone else. He'd suggest we stop and eat something and I'd be like, oh yeah, that's a good idea. Maybe we should eat. But honestly if he had never said anything I would have just kept going without feeling a need to eat. So there's one way this would be lighter: I don't feel a need to eat as much food.

Meanwhile, rather than fill up my food bag with lightweight carby things, I brought heavier fatty things. Since they were way more calorie dense, my food ended up actually being lighter. I have to admit to relying more on cereal and noodles in the past but this time I relied more on coconut products, cheese, jerky, nuts. My food tasted better and gave me more energy than bars and candy. (I'm sure that's a big duh to old-timers but common knowledge gets lost sometimes, especially after long distance hiking with resupplies coming out of convenience stores.)

Anyway, this seems to me to be a decent strategy although one that takes time and commitment before the fact. Additionally, I had a thought that perhaps once you get your body keto-adapted, that it can burn your fat through the night to keep warm, so long as you have a low-carb dinner. And if that theory is true, perhaps eating a high carb dinner potentially makes you colder at night by raising your insulin and turning off the burning of fat for energy? Just a theory. I have no idea if it actually works that way.

What do you think?

From wikipedia

"The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that in medicine is used primarily to treat difficult-to-control (refractory) epilepsy in children.

The ketogenic diet is not a benign, holistic or natural treatment for epilepsy.

In adults, common side effects include weight loss, constipation, raised cholesterol levels and, in women, menstrual irregularities including amenorrhoea."

Sounds pretty serious to me.

Piper, your diet is not that unusual. In the low carb literature, such as researched by Dr. Michael Eades, M.D. (author of the Protein Power diet), and others, the Eskimos lived on this diet for centuries (a totally carb-free diet).

I have long thought of backpacking as really being spine/muscle-out weight is what you're packing and if one could get their body fat % down to ideal levels, the hike would be that much more fun, one would be more energetic, and the weight you're carrying would truly feel that more lighter. (Instead of focusing on skin-out weight only.)

I tried unsuccessfully to achieve that ideal body fat percentage via dieting and exercise combined (I typically eat (while not on the trail) a Paleolithic diet that is Zone balanced (40% calories are carbs from fruit/vegetables; 30% calories from protein; 30% from healthy fat).

However, recently (a little over 6 weeks ago), I discovered two books that according to all the research will add decades of health to one's life. The one is free in ebook form: The Fast-5 Diet ( http://www.fast-5.com ) and the other is a $39 book, the Eat-Stop-Eat Diet from http://www.eatstopeat.com .

Quite simply these two books supplement your existing diet, not replace them. The idea is to give your body intermittent fasting periods through the week and they explain what happens biologically during intermittent fasts (such as one releases 20 times as much human growth hormone during an intermittent fast than during a normal eating day). Page 61 of Eat-Stop-Eat:

"A very impressive volume of published peer reviewed scientific studies, short-term
intermittent fasting has been shown to have the following health benefits:

• Decreased body fat & body weight
• Maintenance of skeletal muscle mass
• Decreased blood glucose levels
• Decreased insulin levels & increased insulin sensitivity
• Increased lipolysis & fat oxidation
• Increased Uncoupling Protein 3 mRNA
• Increased norepinephrine & epinephrine levels
• Increased Glucagon levels
• Increased growth hormone levels
• Decreased food related stress
• Decreased chronic systemic Inflammation

Quite a list I’m sure you will agree. What is even more amazing is that many of the
benefits were found after as little as 24 hours of fasting!

From experience in the supplement industry, I can tell you that if you could make a
pill with all these claims, you would easily have a 100 million dollar a year product."

The other book, Fast-5, written by a M.D. explains there are two hunger mechanisms -- one triggered by a long fast (in me, I've noticed it is about 31 hours) while the other hunger mechanism is triggered by having one bite of food (which is why reduced calorie diets fail typically, because one's will power is not enough to overcome this hunger mechanism in 99% of people) -- the research on intermittent fasting shows that mice who continuously eat the same number of calories that the intermittent fasting mice eat (except they go without any food 1 out of 3 days), that is assume the mice eat 6000 calories in six days in both groups, in one group the mice eat 1000 calories a day, the other group the mice eat 1500 calories a day two days straight then fast the third day. The intermittent fasting mice live 33% longer than the other group of mice, and the intermittent fasting mice lose more weight! The other group of mice suffer more stress (because they're continually having a reduced calorie diet). (I've simplified the numbers here to illustrate the finding.)

I've only been on the diet since October 9 and I've lost 15.5 pounds already. I'm down to 175.5 pounds and wear medium size pants now -- first time since about 1994. My goal is to continue until I get to 14% body fat (a man's goal is < 15%, a woman's goal is < 22%). My scale from Tanita (from Sears) tells me my body fat percentage. But in maintenance mode I still want to fast at least once a week a whole day and in the interim days do a couple of Fast-5 short intermittent fasts. (On the Fast-5 diet, you only eat during 5pm to 10pm daily and in maintenance mode, you do this a couple days a week. On the Eat-Stop-Eat diet, you minimally do every 3rd then 4th day a 24 hour fasting period, say from 6pm to 6pm, although with me I've gone the excess route of a whole waking day fast which ends up being about 31 hours long with the two sleeping periods surrounding the fast.)

Wikipedia has some interesting pages of links on this -- "intermittent fasting" and "caloric reduction". One can also google "Alternate Day Fasting".

Edited: 11/27/2011 -- corrected percentages on the Zone Diet (had two reversed originally).

Edited by marti124 on 11/27/2011 12:07:12 MST.

In theory, both of those intermittent fasting methods, when added to a Paleo-style diet, should more accurately reproduce the caloric intake of our ancestors, in frequency and quality. I'm not in a position to do nutritional research, but I always imagined a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer society having periods of gorging and periods of fasting, dependent on when the hunters were successful. Most of the reactions to intermittent fasting that those books list make perfect sense as metabolic responses to a short term food deficit brought on by a tribe waiting for the hunt to come home.

The research there looks quite interesting and I will definately read through it but one thing that often gets confused is that just because it was the way early man evolved doesn't mean it is the opitmim way.

We must remember that evolution only weeds out unsuccessful adaptations. Essentially weeding out those who are not able to successfully reproduce. So in early man the key was to survive and breed as often as possible between 14 and 40 when you died and ensure that the children you had made it to breeding age. This doesn't neccessarily translate into living well as you age.

So while I am a big proponent of clean unprocessed foods I do think that replicating early diets definately needs to be backed with research and is too often accepted without research under the logic of it was what our ancestors did.

If a diet works for you great! On the other hand I'm also skeptical that just because our ancestors ate something that automatically means its the ultimate diet. First off we don't have a detailed knowledge of what folks were eating thousands of years ago and what proportions of that they ate. We can guess based on what foods we know would have been available but thats not very precise.
Is it just me or are diets a dime a dozen? I guess there are different reasons for diets, losing weight, gaining muscle, dealing with cholesteral or whatever. But still there seems to be no concensus out there. This lack of consensus makes me skeptical when people start promoting a new idea of whats healthy for me.

"If a diet works for you great! On the other hand I'm also skeptical that just because our ancestors ate something that automatically means its the ultimate diet. First off we don't have a detailed knowledge of what folks were eating thousands of years ago and what proportions of that they ate. We can guess based on what foods we know would have been available but thats not very precise.
Is it just me or are diets a dime a dozen? I guess there are different reasons for diets, losing weight, gaining muscle, dealing with cholesteral or whatever. But still there seems to be no concensus out there. This lack of consensus makes me skeptical when people start promoting a new idea of whats healthy for me."

+1

Any diet that doesn't include enough carbs to enable the metabolism of fat will just force the body to utilize a less efficient process of breaking down protein, either dietary or muscle, to obtain the necessary carbohydrate. A byproduct of this process is urea which must be eliminated via the kidneys, requiring increased water intake. Why not just eat a balanced diet of carbs, fats, and proteins in a quantity calibrated to your activity level and let it go at that? My 2 cents.

I'm not sure I wanted to debate whether or not a low carb, high fat diet was a good one. However, it is nice to see that there are people here who understand how it works. I am not doing the Paleo diet because I still eat some cheese, cream and butter. I've been following the information from Dr. Eades and Dr. Harris.

What I was curious about is once you have accomplished switching your body over to a state where your body can mobilize your fat stores for energy, in other words, once you've keto-adapted, would a dinner that did not raise your insulin leave you better able to manage a long, cold night sleeping on the snow? Better than a dinner that did raise your insulin?

sounds like an Atkin-nese diet

I have had several acquaintances that have been on similar diets, all lost a significant amount of weight- sadly all have gained it back :(

I'm on the "pretty much eat what you want diet" and have been since I was a kid, it appears that if your caloric burning level is on the higher end, then diet becomes much less of an issue

I do and try to eat healthy (whole grains, fruits, veggies, lower fat meats (read elk/deer/antelope)) overall and I'm not too much a glutton (excluding yesterday! :)), but I spend more time concerned about exercise and much less about diet

As a Type 1 diabetic I've had to directly deal with learning how to visibly control my blood sugars so that I can get some control over the disease. Nothing worked until I started to learn about how insulin works and how carbohydrates affects it. The thing that most people don't understand is that diabetes is a reflection of the problems of the way we eat in our society. Diabetes and obesity (which are related through insulin) hardly existed in any society before the advent of modern food processing methods, and a little earlier, the development of grain-based agriculture. All paleoanthropological evidence shows that modern diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, cancer, obesity, coeliac disease and so forth, were extremely rare in paleolithic times. This strongly suggests... and more and more research is showing it so... that there is something wrong with the way we eat today. The current obesity problem in the States is unprecedented in history. Due to the foods we eat, it simply isn't possible that fat (the popularly maligned nutrient) is the culprit, since with each meal only a certain amount of fat can be eaten before one becomes satiated. What has increased exponentially are carbohydrates. Until you actually take heed, in the same way that you weigh each item in a UL gear list, of the amount of carbohydrates that you consume each day in each bit of food you eat, most people have no idea just how much of it there is. Go into any store and look for anything that doesn't have any carbohydrates... today almost nothing is free of them. For health the minimum amount of carbohydrates that you need is about 30 to 40 g of carbohydrates a day, the upper limit is about 150 g, after which the higher you go the more you automatically start gaining weight. In nature most carbs come from the vegetables you eat, which are a vital part of one's diet. Grains, however, have never been a part of the human anatomical development. Even cows can't digest grains!

As a diabetic I check my blood sugar four times a day. I've been doing it for 15 years. Unlike most people I have visual and measured confirmation of how the food I eat affects my blood sugar. Without going into the intricacies of how insulin works with carbohydrates, suffice it to say that no matter how much fat I eat (without accompanying carbs) my blood sugars don't go up. If I eat just a tiny amount of carbs, though, especially things like white sugar and white bread, my blood sugar shoots up. For most of the last 15 years I religiously followed the conventional guidelines of eating low-fat, high-carb diet, mostly vegetarian, and not only did I become diabetic, but I gained weight and had little control of my blood sugars, which is the heart of what causes diabetes. Last June, after reading "The Diabetic Solution" by Dr. Richard Bernstein, and "Primal Blueprint" by Mark Sisson, I tried lowering my carbs for the first time in my life, and upping the fats. To my utter surprise, my blood sugars completely normalized and all my diabetic symptoms went away. including neuropathy of the extremities, a three-year-long fungal infection of my right hand, and even the tinitus in my ears. My HbA1C (long-term blood sugar measurement which is more accurate than home measurements) lowered for the first time in 15 years. My doctor was incredulous. My energy levels went way up, colds disappeared, and I felt better than I had in over 25 years.

Recently I started reading Philip Maffetone's "The Big Book of Endurance Training". Whereas "The Primal Blueprint" goes into great detail about the effects of nutrition, and especially does the best job of explaining insulin and how it works and causes problems, Maffetone's book concentrates on the physical training aspect of "aerobic" and "anaerobic" training. Maffetone explains that aerobic exercise is primarily fat-burning based, whereas anaerobic exercise is glucose-based. Endurance athletes (and this includes mountain walkers) need the slow burn of the fat-burning metabolism, while athletes such as weight lifters and sprinters need the quick energy of sugar-based metabolism. Through decades and thousands of meticulously tested and recorded training of world-class elite athletes, Maffetone came to the conclusion that the healthiest people maintained the best health by focusing on an aerobic threshold, including those people who needed anaerobic development to do their activities. He emphasized that the moment the aerobic base is compromised, all the rest gets compromised as well.

What surprised me was that I had always been taught that aerobic exercise had something to do with the amount of oxygen in the blood and that the more you did, and the harder your trained, the better. Maffetone, however, explains that pushing yourself beyond the threshold of your aerobic base, which falls within the energy output of a fat-based metabolism, is the primary cause of injury, disease, and poor performance. He advocates a low carbohydrate, high fat, moderate protein diet, plus a low level of exercise that never pushes beyond the capability of the aerobic system's threshold. For that a person needs at least three months of slow, easy training (using a a heart rate monitor and maintaining the heart rate within specific levels) so as to train the body to using primarily fat for energy... the ketogenic diet. Most people, because they eat diets high in carbs and push themselves beyond the aerobic level, tend to need more and more carbs in order to maintain their energy levels, with the resulting problems with weight gain, bad blood sugar control and over-production of insulin (which leads to obesity and eventually diabetes), and overtraining. Most people have glucose-based metabolisms. That is why it took Piper 6 weeks to change over to a fat-burning metabolism.

If Maffetone's elite endurance athletes (including many of the world's best ultramarathoners and triathletes) can perform so exceptionally well on a this system without injuries or stress, while often coming from careers ruined by overtraining and carb-bsed diets, then there must be something to the low-carb, high-fat, moderate protein and lots of vegetables recommendations coming out now in paleo circles. Logically it doesn't make sense that there isn't an ideal diet for humans, whereas we seem to have no trouble at all coming up with ideal diets for our pets. We're animals, too, and also have specific needs in nutrition.

That being said, humans are omnivores and adaptable, including with our food. Other books you might want to check out are, "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" by Michael Pollan, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, "Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food" by Catherine Shanahan, and "Slow Burn: Burn Fat Faster By Exercising Slower" by Stu Mittleman.

I think people should try out the diet and learn more about how nutrition works before pooh-poohing what it can do. I was very skeptical before I started, especially since, with diabetes, I can't afford to play around with my metabolism. Among diabetics low carb is becoming the de-facto way of maintaining blood sugar control... and a healthy diabetic lifestyle is a healthy lifestyle for anyone.

Piper, I think you really have something there about maintaining heat at night. It could even be said that perhaps many women are colder in the mountains because they tend to eat far less fat than men, and therefore end up with colder metabolisms. It's worth looking more into.

Edited by butuki on 11/25/2011 18:18:47 MST.

I understand lots of people gain weight back after a diet so that may not be a problem with the diet.
I'm still relatively young and apparently have a high matabolism so I don't have to worry about my weight especially since my noraml diet is relatively healthy. Long term I'd be more interested in what diet is best for preventing long term problems like heart disease but honestly I'm skeptical just how much is proven fact in this area beyond common sense like "eat a balanced diet not a lot of junk food."
I have had friends passionately telling me the problem in America is too much protein/meat products while diets like the Atkins seem to include lots of it. Of course there is money to be made writing health guides and selling products so that introduces a bias. I'm sure there is a best way I just need to sit down and works for them. When I say I'm a skeptic I'm just being realistic. I'm not going to take a diet off a magizine in the supermarket checkout line and run with it. If I change my diet I'm going to need to seriously study the issue.

I still think lifestyle is as important as diet. Obviously our modern lifestyle creates problems. Not only are we more sedatary on average but a fast paced life means getting a healthy meal is difficult. Its not impossible of course, you just have to make an effort. Its easy to just grab a cheeseburger.

When I worked with troubled boys at a wilderness camp we had a very nice menu of food that wasn't more or less the food pyramid. Normally counselors would serve the boys their food so they got a balanced serving of everything. Along with that we stayed active. A lot of counselors and campers lost weight just by limiting themselves to one balanced plate and perhaps skipping desert. Some of our campers had the opposite problem. Apparently their behavioral meds kept their appatite down which was probably aggrevated by a choatic home life without regular meals. They would come in looking like little war refugees. One very skinny boy gained gained 8 pounds in about a month. By the time he left us he had the most muscular build I've ever seen on an 11 year old.

Edited by Cameron on 11/25/2011 18:25:05 MST.

Luke, I definitely recommend you read Philip Maffetone's "The Big Book of Endurance Training". He'll explain far better than I can how it all works. Big muscles are not, he insists, an indication of good health. In fact he also insists that concentrating on putting on big muscles is detrimental to most people's health. Besides, your scenario most definitely is not a long-term healthy one.

The paleo diet is not the Atkins diet. Vegetables are very much a huge part of the paleo diet. Personally I follow Mark Sisson's "primal" recommendations, in that he includes a higher amount of carbs because of the vital benefits of vegetables.

I didn't know what paleo (or primal) was about until I seriously started reading about it and practicing it. I think people get too skeptical of things that they haven't actually learned about or tried themselves. The thing I respect and can accept about paleo is that nearly all of it is based heavily on real research and much skepticism, and trial and error. Mark Sisson himself, on his very popular website "Mark's Daily Apple", frequently hosts skeptics, often scientists and nutritionists, who take him to task. Over the years he's revised what he's learned and is always willing to learn more. The whole paleo movement is very healthy and open-minded. The whole community very much reminds me of the early BPL days, with the same commitment to honesty and enthusiastic testing, with health, not weight, the focus.

My reply is to give you a intro link about three key people in the Paleolithic Diet movement. All three have made very significant contributions. I have more links at my Google Profile (see my BPL profile).

http://jdmoyer.com/2010/03/17/a-meta-analysis-of-kooky-diets-part-iii/

This is a photo of At Devany, author of The New Evolution Diet, who is now age 72. I hope I can be this healthy at his age. He's doing something right. He mixes the Paleolithic Diet with Intermittent Fasting and Weight Resistance workouts.

Best page of links about Paleolithic diet is here: http://paleodiet.com/

Best intro to the diet is considered this page by a M.D.:
http://paleolithicdiet.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/original-introduction/

I used to weight 200 lbs ... I lost it without any real diet ... The old fashion way .... Exercize

Thats not to say you shouldnt eat healthy with more natural foods ... But exercise trumps fancy diets any day

The trick to remember with all these paleo diets is that our ancestors also exercized alot ... Running away from sabertooths and hunting mastadons is a great incentive to stay in shape

Exercise is hard, and its sweaty, and you likely wont see any gains for months (i didnt) ... But if you truly want to get fit its the only way

Its been shown to also decrease the loss of cognitive function with age and give better sex drive ;)

My view ... Skip the diet ... Spend more time at the pool, park, track, etc ... And commit to exercising as hard as reasonably possible

Millions of americans are taken in by the diet craze every year ... And millions are still overweight ...

After u exercise to a healthy enough level you can eat what you want ... Im typing this on my phone while drinking a 800 calories sbucks frap .... But then im swimming 2 klicks tonight ...

Miguel very interesting stuff (your first post came out while I was typing mine). If I have time I might be checking out those books, looks like a good place to start.

Couple thoughts...
Regarding grains, hasn't grain and bread been a part of the human diet for about 5000 years or so? I'm assuming the first record of it would be the agriculture in the Mesopotamian area. Are you implying that bread is a contributing factor? Whats the difference between whole wheat and the modern white bread? After reading up on diet my mom desided never to buy the family white bread again but we ate plenty of whole wheat bread (mostly homemade). How do the two breads compare on the number of carbs?

You said my scenerio wasn't healthy in the long term. I assume you meant the young man who bulked up not the guys who lost weight. I'd tend to disagree but maybe I wasn't clear. He didn't have huge movie star muscles, but what he had was well defined and he was very strong for his age. He did put on weight fast for a while but than it stopped and he started growing and gaining weight more like an average kid. He wasn't liftind weights or anything like that he was just living an active lifestyle which involved a lot of physical activity but nothing extremely rigorious (i.e. the kind where a growing kid could get hurt).


Whats the traditional Japanese diet like? I believe someone told me the Japanese have a lower rate of heart disease and other problems and were overal a bit healthier. Is that diet based? On the other hand could some of that simply be genetic since we're talking about a distinct ethnic group thats been relatively stable for a long time? Also I heard the average height in Japan increased when they moved to a more western diet. Could this be just greater prosperity in general or could it be because for all the bad things in the western diet there was something missing from the Japanese diet?

Check out "Intermittent Fasting" at Wikipedia or Google. You'll see that mice given the same calories, one set on continuous avaibility to eat, other deprived of food every third day, that the mice who do the intermittent fasting live 33% to 50% longer.

Exercise alone won't do this for the mice; diet alone won't do this for the mice.

Also there is plenty of evidence that reducing calories but eating 3 meals a day is for many many people stressful as one has to use will power to keep their caloric intake in check. With Intermittent Fasting, when you eat, will power is not needed, it's stress free. (Hardly any will power is needed to fast because you don't trigger the strong hunger mechanism that having one bite of food triggers -- read the book, Fast-5 Diet, which is free at http://www.fast-5.com .

Science has known about prolonged living with Intermittent Fasting since the 50s. The same scientist who chemically stopped aging in Tape (Scotch Magic Tape) spent 25 years researching aging in humans and he discovered and wrote abundantly about this. I would have done intermittent fasting earlier if I had not been deluded by all the wife tales and myths surrounding Intermittent Fasting. The book, Eat-Stop-Eat, blows all of these myths apart.

It's interesting that on that a group of humans in an Intermittent Fasting experiment, that they released 20 times more Human Growth Hormone on their fasting day than on their eating day. That is definitely healthy for one (and that HGH helps really burn fat too).

http://blogs.menshealth.com/health-headlines/fast-to-burn-fat-not-so-fast/2011/04/18

This is all really interesting information.

"Big muscles are not, he insists, an indication of good health. In fact he also insists that concentrating on putting on big muscles is detrimental to most people's health. "

I would not agree with this based soley on the fact that to get a larger cross section of muscle fibres (i.e. size) one needs to increase strength. Strength training is vital for people as they age. Strength training maintains muscle mass and prevents joint strain.

Studies also show that strength training vastly increases the muscles ability to endure constant tension and hence, over all endurance. Specific endurance training will not improve strength to a measurable degree but strength training will increase endurance measurably.

I am going to read more on this diet. Some facinating results to be sure.

I would not agree with this based soley on the fact that to get a larger cross section of muscle fibres (i.e. size) one needs to increase strength. Strength training is vital for people as they age. Strength training maintains muscle mass and prevents joint strain.

David, Maffetone specifically does suggest that for people over 45 doing weight training and strengthening the muscles is vital for maintaining health. But the book goes into great detail to show how anaerobic training should only be performed after a healthy aerobic base has been established, and that if the aerobic base is compromised all anaerobic training should be stopped until the aerobic base is healed. He doesn't say strength-training shouldn't be performed (after all he trained Olympic athletes and all manner of world-class level elite athletes around the world), but that long-term health and what all people need before anything else, is an well-balanced aerobic base. He also explains how it is the aerobic muscles (the long, thin "red" muscles) that hold the skeleton and joints together and hold up the body, not the anaerobic (big, white) muscles, whose only purpose is short bursts of power. He even shows how anaerobic muscles, because they rely on glucose to power them, and because the glucose-based metabolism only holds about 3 minutes worth of energy, cannot be the base for moving the body about and getting on with long-term day-to-day activities.

Think about it; it really makes sense. Why did we develop the ability to store fat on our bodies? What purpose does that serve? People talk about body fat as only an inconvenience and detriment to health, but if it didn't serve a purpose toward our survival it would not have developed. Why did our bodies evolve to store fat instead of glucose? Fat has far more energy storing capacity than either carbs or proteins (fat: 9 kcal/gram vs. carb/protein: 4 kcal/gram). It releases slowly over time. Energy from fat is the brain's preferred source of energy (the brain is mostly made of fat). And fat is vital to the proper functioning of all our cells.

By developing a fat-based metabolism the body then has an enormous source of energy to draw from. It helps us get through times of famine, such as long winters. Most animals, and humans among them, donn't move about a fast speeds all the time... most of the time they move slowly and deliberately. Fat burning is ideal for that... sugar burning goes by too fast and glucose stores in the muscles (white muscles) quickly gets depleted. People in the past walked huge distances around the globe (not ran) and relied very much on their fat stores to make those distances. They couldn't have done it on a carb-based diet unless they had a steady supply of carbs to take with them. In the wild, carbs are very hard to come by, especially during the ice ages.

Big muscles and sugar based sources of power are great for short bursts of strength such as climbing a tree or sprinting from danger, and are still necessary for overall health, but they are not necessary. Strong red muscles are, though, so that the skeletal system and joints, as you, David, point out, can hold up through old age.

Luke, I'm not ignoring your questions... just ran out of time to write. Give me a day or two. I'm heading out to the mountains now...

Edited by butuki on 11/25/2011 20:34:29 MST.

All right Miguel I'll look forward to hearing further thoughts from you after you get back from the mountains. Enjoy them for me.

"He even shows how anaerobic muscles, because they rely on glucose to power them, and because the glucose-based metabolism only holds about 3 minutes worth of energy, cannot be the base for moving the body about and getting on with long-term day-to-day activities."

I haven't read Maffetone's book, Miguel, but I have read a fair amount of exercise physiology, and this statement runs counter to everything I have read. Glucose requires external oxygen for complete oxidation. It carries 6 of the 12 oxygen atoms required for its complete oxidation in its molecular structure, but the other 6 must be supplied via the cardio vascular system, i.e., aerobically. Those 3 minutes of anaerobic energy are supplied first by ATP stores, good for 10-20 seconds, and second by the creatine cycle, good for about 2 minutes. Any exercise after that must be aerobic. The body stores up to ~400-450 grams of glucose as glycogen, in the liver and muscles, enough to run about the first 20 miles of a marathon, where most runners "hit the wall". But glucose is not the only source of energy utilized. As you state, fat also supplies energy. In fact it supplies most of our energy at lower levels of exertion, and higher levels of fat utilization can be attained by pushing your aerobic threshold higher through training, again as you have stated. This is what keeps elite marathoners from hitting the wall. However, a certain amount of carbohydrate is required to facilitate the metabolism of fat in a process known as The Krebs Cycle. I think this is pretty well accepted by physiologists, exercise and otherwise. The proportion of energy supplied by fat and carbohydrate varies according to the intensity of the exercise and the aerobic capacity of the individual. The lower the intensity, the higher proportion of energy supplied by fat, and vice versa. At least, this is what my reading tells me.

As for the brain's energy source, I would refer you to the following link, one among many that say the same thing: The primary energy source for the brain is glucose.

http://www.acnp.org/g4/gn401000064/ch064.html

Just a few comments.

-not everyone has the same number of red and white fibers.

-red fibres have very little propensity for maximum contraction and therefore strength.

-strength and power are not the same thing and must be for differently.

-white fibres are used for shorter bursts of energy but that is a maximum effort. Having very strong white fibres increases endurance in a way that can be analogous to a large motor v.s. a small motor in the same sized car. A larger motor does not have to work nearly as hard as the smaller motor at low to moderate intensities. Just because you have increased the ability to maximally contract the white fibres by increasing strength, it does not mean that you will be contracting them at maximal intensity all the time. Think reserves.

-only the strong survive (just kidding)

"-only the strong survive"

Sure, but only the good die young.

I'm gonna live to be very, very old......

Tom, how do these experts who state that the primary energy source for the brain is glucose or that a certain amount of carbohydrate is required to facilitate the metabolism of fat account for the fact that Eskimos have lived centuries on a totally carb-free diet? I'm sure they use plenty of brain power to survive in such a hostile environment.

Can you imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors starting out a day when they intend to hunt by saying "I have to carb up to do the hunt today" -- yea, with what? How could they have ever carb'd up or carb'd out? Their diet lacked anything that was carb dense. This was the case for tens of thousands of years. We'd have gone extinct if such was true about carbohydrates as many cited experts claim.

I can imagine the retort would be that including carbohydrates in the diet enable the society to be more advanced. Maybe, maybe not. It's pretty rare to see carb-free societies, and in the Artic, that's pretty much where such could be the case. For myself, I believe in having about 30% of my calories come from low glycemic carbs (fruits and vegetables though).

My understanding but I'm not anywhere a professional in these fields, is that body fat consumed can be utilized as carbohydrate energy (same for fat in food too). That would explain how our ancestors and the Eskimos are (were) able to think.

The one thing you learn fast in researching nutrition is how little consensus there is across the various dietary research endeavors except for most of them do prefer natural food over artificial food but even then their are those who defend GMO food (and some of these work for the FDA).

In the end, one has to go with what works for one's self, backed up with some degree of research you're not going totally off the deep end (just about anything works for a short while for one's self).

I'm rushing out the door, so can't take a lot of time to write, but I wanted to say, to everyone, I am in no way an expert on any of this. I'm still at the beginning of learning the basics! So Tom, David... I'm completely open to learning more about all this and how it works. I've read quite a lot in the last three years, particularly this year, but only now is much of it making any sense or one part beginning to click with another. I still don't really understand how the energy from fat works with the brain, compared with the energy from carbs, but in my personal experience with high and low diabetic blood sugars, there is a visceral difference in both my feelings of alertness and wellness, and of perceived mental and emotional acuity when eating different kinds of foods... I'd say it is much like the difference in drinking strong coffee (with its caffeine) and drinking, say, orange juice. I can physically feel the difference between high blood sugar and low blood sugar, and my energy levels are different. This is different from how many calories I've consumed. I can eat a big plate of 4 slices of bacon, 3 buttered, scrambled eggs, and round of avocado... a meal which has a lot of calories, but my blood sugar will remain low (and my insulin injection will be very low so as to keep myself from dropping into hypoglycemia), while a meal of a simple tuna sandwich with white bread... with much lower calories than the former meal... will shoot my blood sugar way up, require a big dose of insulin and will only give me energy for about two hours, while the high-fat diet will often keep me going all day long. I don't gain weight on the high fat meal, but I do gain weight with the smaller, high carb diet, in spite of there being less calories. I still don't understand how this works chemically and biologically. But it does. The same way Piper has found out. I tend to eat far less with a high-fat diet. I never get hungry. And my blood sugar spikes have disappeared.

That being said, after some trauma in August when I was hospitalized, I started eating carbs again, mostly bread, but not in any high amounts. I've gained back all my weight, my blood sugars are sky high again, the fungus is slowly returning on my fingers, and I'm tired all the time again. I'm almost certain now that carbs are the culprit for most people.

Luke,

Unfortunately you aren't going to run into much "proven fact", and to make things worse, much of what sounds like common sense is probably incorrect. Our current knowledge of how the body works is continually being added to, and so what appears initially correct may be turned on its head as additional details come to light. This can seem a bit futile, but the overall trend is positive. (Consider things like the germ theory of disease, antibiotics, and monoclonal antibodies.) Unfortunately it also gives us things like margarine and low-fat diets.

Since I grabbed dinner before finishing this reply, I saw you had some other questions:

1. Correct, grains date back much farther than 5k years; closer to 10K is more likely for domestication in the mideast. (Wiki claims some use of wild barley 23K years ago.) Evolutionarily speaking, this is still quite recent.

1a. Yes, modern grain is quite different from that a century ago, or a millenia ago. Most wheat is now a dwarf wheat, which helps increase yield. The gluten content is also higher than in the past.

1b. Whole wheat includes the bran and germ; so you have more protein, fiber, and some additional nutrients. It also seems to confer health benefits compared to refined flour. (Or from an alternate viewpoint, may be less harmful.) However, there are different types of wheat with different gluten amounts, and you can even find "archaic" wheat like einkorn if you look around.

2. Looking at cultures (e.g. Japanese) means that many factors are in play: genetics, diet, behavior, climate, etc. It's a big can of worms. The best I can say is that there seem to be certain "diseases of civilization" that are minimally present in aboriginal societies, even when accounting for decreased average lifespan. If pressed to identify dietary factors with the strongest correlation, I would point to wheat and refined sugar.

It is all very complicated when you try to analyze all this stuff. So don't.

So my suggestion is that you start by exercising every single day. And just walking 2 hours a day AT A FAIRLY FAST PACE will be sufficient. At a good pace, that would be around 6 miles per day, 42 miles per week. That is EVERY DAY -- don't skip a day unless you have the flu or a broken leg. Don't have two hours? Then do an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon/evening. You can exercise more if you want, just do the minimum 42 miles per week walking at a minimum. Don't have the 14 hours per week available? Analyze your TV and computer time. You can sacrifice some of that. No gym membership needed. Still can't find the 14 hours? Look harder, you life depends on it. Everyday walking will help wire your brain to stomach communication system and together they will determine the correct portions to eat without you trying to think it out.

Now just stay away from a lot of heavily processed foods, especially flour and sugar products. Don't even keep this stuff at home. You can get your needed carbs from fruits and vegetables. Go ahead and eat stuff you like. Your body will start to crave the foods it needs if you are not eating enough (e.g., fats, protein, carbs). If you get a craving for ice cream or a candy bar, walk to the store and get just one. It is okay. Need a Big Mac or a Taco? Its okay, go get one. Just don't eat them every day. Minimize alcohol. One glass of red wine a day is okay too. Try Gallo Hearty Burgundy, usually on sale for $6.99 @1.5 liter -- don't be a wine snob, you will learn to like it. And you will save enough money on this inexpensive wine that you will be able to celebrate special events with a bottle of Dom Perignon (don't drink the whole thing, share it with your significant other).

Of course good genes help, and this may not be ideal with those with some diseases.

My father is 88 years old and has been doing this as long as I can remember, other than the Champagne. He is slender, fit, and a pain to debate as this has kept his mind very sharp. I do the same, although some here would debate the sharpness of my brain :)



P.S. Now when you go backpacking eat anything you want, to include junk food.

I didn't want to muddle my previous post, so here are some additional comments:

There are some outdated dietary sayings that float around, and I call them myths because even though they are be correct at some level, they don't translate well to the complex system that is homo sapiens. (Worse, it does a disservice to people with weight problems.)

Some easy ones:
"a calorie is a calorie", or references to the 2nd law of thermodynamics:
Only true in a bunsen burner, also comes from a misunderstanding of thermodynamics.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC506782/

"fat burns in a carbohydrate flame":
Should be rephrased as "both muscle fat and carbohydrate burn in an amino acid flame"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18500949
(An intermediate reference; the Robergs and Roberts text is the original cited)

That said, humans are pretty adaptable; carb consumption, if harmful, might only be harmful in excessive amounts, or in people who have some level of metabolic derangement. Could this be triggered by certain neolithic foods? There certainly seems to be a decent correlation, which while not causation, as the xkcd comic says, "it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'".

Roleigh,

That's correct (edit: dietary protein can be used to obtain necessary glucose; fats can provide all other energy); your brain is often said to need at least 100-120g of glucose per day. If you go no-carb (think Inuit), that need will drop to about 30-40g, as the energy deficit is made up by ketone bodies. Eating adequate protein will allow your liver to produce the necessary glucose without cannabilizing muscle tissue. (Your liver uses fat to power this process, which also creates ketone bodies.)

Edited by requiem on 11/26/2011 00:18:25 MST.

Glad to see someone (Jeremy) finally chime in with a reference to gluconeogenesis. The brain functions quite well on ketones except for a very small portion of tissues that do seem to require glucose. Gluconeogenesis can also supply sufficient glucose to deal with krebs cycle issues.

That said, in individuals that are not fully ketoadapted (as in: most of us), the liver's not terribly efficient at the process, and that's probably why you had such issues with low energy for those months, Piper.

Dietary carbs shouldn't be entirely demonized, however. A healthy body can handle them just fine, and is evolutionarily adapted to do so: starchy tubers are used as a secondary calorie source by hunter-gatherers still present in the environment where the genus Homo emerged, and the genetic adaptation to produce Amylase (an enzyme that breaks down many starches found in such sources) is a testament to that. Most northern "eskimo" cultures did include some starch and fruit-based carbs seasonally, and the few that didn't (mostly alaskan if I recall) should be regarded as an extreme example of what can be done, but not necessarily what "should" be done.

If your metabolism hasn't been altered by a life of bombardment with inappropriate foods, good carb sources are nothing to frown upon, provided that intake isn't excessive. I can eat the majority of my calories as carbs (from the right sources) and not experience health problems, but there's definitely a difference in how I feel and function between a more glucose-based metabolism and more ketone-based metabolism. Not exactly better or worse, but different. So it becomes a matter of preference, and I usually prefer to get most of my calories from fat and avoid spiking my insulin for that reason.

I have noted that I'm a lot better at dealing with the cold when carbs are minimized, probably for precisely the reasons you speculate related to insulin levels. I've noted (and this is completely anecdotal so take it for what it's worth) that a lot of people I know who are "skinny" but have a little belly of subcutaneous fat stores, which seems to indicate that they can handle the carb intake without getting obese but are probably inefficient at mobilizing fat for energy, are the same individuals who are ALWAYS cold. I speculate that their consistent cycles of carb intake insulin elevation keep them from utilizing the fat they have stored to generate body heat. As far as I'm aware, the "brown fat" cells that generate that heat require fat rather than glucose to do so (can't confirm that though). I suppose it's something I should research further.

"Tom, how do these experts who state that the primary energy source for the brain is glucose or that a certain amount of carbohydrate is required to facilitate the metabolism of fat account for the fact that Eskimos have lived centuries on a totally carb-free diet? I'm sure they use plenty of brain power to survive in such a hostile environment."

Roleigh,

I didn't expect to change your mind. I was merely trying to add a different perspective to the conversation. The experts as you call them constitute a majority opinion across the medical and scientific communities, and what they say makes sense to me. As one of the above poster above noted, gluconeogenisis will provide glucose for the brain, up to a point. In its absence, ketone bodies will fill the bill, as is the case also with the heart. The problem arises when dietary protein is inadequate and body fat is exhausted. Then the body starts cannabalizing itself to obtain the necessary protein. All that said, ketone bodies are not the body's optimal choice, coming into play under normal circumstances only when adequate carbs are unavailable. As a physician friend of mine remarked today when I ran this by him, the body is enormously flexible and always has backup systems available for abnormal situations. I think this is one of them. Also, while ketone bodies seem to function fine for endurance, they are not as efficient as carbs for high intensity exercise. Or so the "experts" say. Also, as you mentioned, civilization didn't really start to take off until ready sources of carbohydrates, mostly grains but also potatoes, became available. I wonder if there is a message for us there? Both the Inuit and others, such as the Masai, have remained either hunter/gatherer or pastoral to this day.

Along the lines of Nick's post, I am fairly active, not overweight, and I do fine on a fairly high carb diet, as do many, many others I know or have known in the past. I do, however, end up at around 30% carbs on backpacking trips where the pace is relatively slow and the caloric efficiency of my energy sources is paramount.

Miguel, I think you represent a special case, and a ketogenic diet is increasingly recognized as effective approach to treating diabetes. At least that is the gist of what reading I have done.

Darned interesting thread. Thanks to all who posted.

Edited by ouzel on 11/26/2011 21:01:02 MST.

I was on the Atkins diet for two years and was amazed at how much weight I lost while consuming 3,500 to 4,000 kcals per day. I carefully monitored my ketones and remained in a state of ketosis for months at a time. I noticed a drop in my ability to train with much aerobic intensity but endurance seemed to be uneffected and perhaps even enhanced with very even blood sugar levels.

In addition, headaches I had experienced for decades were gone within a day or two. I slept great and had a much better feeling of overall wellness and have been on a relatively high protein diet since.

As your body switches from running on glucose to ketones was pretty rough for me, and was enough to keep me from cheating. I wasn't much good to anyone for a couple of days but it was fine after that.

I took several backpacking trips during that time that clearly showed me ketones and backpacking could work, but I had to slow the pace a bit and make up with more time on the trail.

It is a low volume diet which took some getting used to but not too bad after you got used to it. The point of the Atkins diet is to find your carb sensitivity and manage the level. Like most "diets" it is a lifestyle that requires permanent change. I spent some time with fhe Tinglet Indians in Alaska and they have generally moved away from their traditional diet and as a result type 2 diabetes has become a big problem.

I wouldn't recommend a backpacking trip as the time to try a radical departure from your normal diet, but if you have been running on ketones for a couple of weeks prior without issues you should be fine. As a side benefit for any tentmates, flatulance is pretty much nonexistant while your body is in a state of ketosis.

The problem arises when dietary protein is inadequate and body fat is exhausted. Then the body starts cannabalizing itself to obtain the necessary protein.

This is a curious statement, Tom. The body has trouble whenever any nutrient is insufficiently provided for, no? The same could be said for carbs when in high intensity workouts... What happens when dietary carbs is inadequate? Hypoglycemia. I'm not sure what you are trying to get at by stating this.

Also, while ketone bodies seem to function fine for endurance, they are not as efficient as carbs for high intensity exercise. Or so the "experts" say. Also, as you mentioned, civilization didn't really start to take off until ready sources of carbohydrates, mostly grains but also potatoes, became available. I wonder if there is a message for us there? Both the Inuit and others, such as the Masai, have remained either hunter/gatherer or pastoral to this day.

Why is there this assumption that the preferred state of being for a healthy organism is high intensity exercise? Why not the opposite way of thinking, where low-intensity exercise (but exercise none-the-less) is the norm and the measure from which you should start thinking about health? If you glance out your window at animals quite the opposite is always apparent... animals invariably go for the less intensive route, only performing high intensity activity when it is necessary, and usually only as long as absolutely needed, no more. Also, you assume that the "higher" and "healthier" state of being for human societies is civilization, as if hunter/gatherers somehow live in a lesser state of being. I'm not sure why you necessarily equate civilization with health. In almost all cases hunter/ gatherers that live their traditional lives tend to be far stronger and healthier than "civilized" equivalents. You have just to take a look at their bodies to see the effects of their lifestyles.

Miguel, I think you represent a special case, and a ketogenic diet is increasingly recognized as effective approach to treating diabetes.

That's the thing. There has been a lot of inquiry into why diabetes happens in the first place and why it has become a skyrocketing epidemic in modern societies. Why, for instance, does the optimal lifestyle for a diabetic completely follow the optimal guidelines of the lifestyle for a non-diabetic person? Almost everything I have read points to diabetes being highest among people who ate the least amount of carbs before their lifestyles changed to modern diets. These are also societies that often sustained periods of famine. The theory now is that people prone to diabetes actually carry genes that, in a lifestyle of few carbs and intermittent fasting, helped them survive, because diabetics are prone to getting fat. Only in an environment of constant plenty, constant high calories, and unending access to carbs does diabetes arise. The coping/ survival mechanism that diabetes prone people carry within themselves was never meant to deal with the onslaught of over-nutrition that modern society allows. And the fact that there are so many people getting diabetes says something about the way we eat. Of course, the lack of exercise has a big part in this, too. But as Mark Sisson suggests in "Primal Blueprint", our health depends about 80% on nutrition and only about 20% on exercise. This is consistent with my above observation that perhaps a gentler form of keeping active and staying healthy is more natural. This constant drive to perform high intensity exercise is quite unnatural for most of our day-to-day lives. Perhaps we should learn something about long-term health and the problem with over-eating and over-training.

Yes, this is a tangent from the OP, but so is half of the rest of this.

Something to consider: Moderation

Taking the middle path is probably the hardest path to take. The dominant culture we live in is not one of moderation, especially not our fast-food and TGI Fridays way of doing things. Self-indulgence and giant portions are typical selling points.

Because our culture's diets are so extreme in one direction, I think we often swing to the extreme in the other as well: diets not based on moderation and variety, but diets equally extreme in their denial of entire food groups, processes, etc. From Raw Veganism to Strict Paleo to intermittent fasting to no-carb, high-carb, etc. I think the sheer variety of "diets for optimal performance" in America/the West goes to show how absolutely conflicted and uncertain we are about what we should be doing when it comes to food. Other cultures don't seem to have this problem; they eat what they've always eaten (though Western fast-food culture is eroding this behavior worldwide).

It makes perfect sense (to me) that in order to resist one extreme, ones takes up its opposite; I've been there, but in the long term, it's always been unsustainable. While it's certainly possible to maintain for some, I've always found any highly restrictive diet to be relatively short-lived; that seems to be the case for most people.

Granted, we can site the Masai, the Inuit, ancient Japanese, and other groups all over the planet for their unique diets and jump to the conclusion that's how we should be eating...But if you average the full-spectrum and sheer variety of human diets and general health, it seems to point to one general idea: we're HIGHLY adaptable and we can generally thrive and achieve "peak" fitness following just about any diet providing a few key elements are there: minimal processing (whole foods), exercise, and moderation.

Amen on the moderation post. Reminds me of the best humorous retort, "moderation in all things including moderation!"

I stumbled across a new health blog today, very, very impressive and I loved her take. Her name is Denise Minger - on her about page she has this quote:

"This site isn’t specifically low-carb or high-carb, vegan or carnivore, raw food or cooked food, or anything else that could be neatly labeled. My own experience as a (recovered) raw vegan taught me that diet-dogma is killer, so the emphasis here is on unraveling research rather than building an ideology. My goal is to make nutritional science accessible and non-boring to those who really care about their health."

Her diet is interesting too (she is not totally raw which is why I think she added the "SOS" to her url.)
http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/01/20/my-current-diet/

Anyway, the reason I included mention of her is that it's not good to be dogmatic as important as it is to keep studying and challenging long held beliefs even one's owns.

Moderation is super important in backpacking as when you do a long hike you have to compromise your diet so it's important to appreciate how to stay healthy eating a varied diet.

By the way I had to add this, can one hike and do intermittent fasting? Read this about a faster who did the hike from Whitney Portal to Mt. Whitney and back to the Portal without any food. The answer is yes.

http://www.gnolls.org/2443/occasional-insanity-outperforms-daily-misery-day-hiking-mt-whitney-fasted/

you can eat cr@ppy stuff and still lose weight ... whether you are "healthier" in the long run or will live to be 100+ years old is another question of course ...

the trick is to keep your output greater than yr input ... like anything else

i lost 15 lbs this season on little caesers pizza, A&W burgers and fries, and gummy bears ... simply because i climbed 5 days a week during climbing season ...

like i said ... the truth about paleo diets is simply that those cavemen exercised alot more than most people did today ... you need to when yr next meal or running away from crazed cave bears depend on it ...

+1 to the entire post

and specifically, the conclusion "we can generally thrive and achieve "peak" fitness following just about any diet providing a few key elements are there: minimal processing (whole foods), exercise, and moderation."

Edited by Ike on 11/27/2011 16:13:33 MST.

Moderation is one of those things that is often sensible, but it's necessary to define what you're being moderate about. Moderate consumption of real foods is obviously the way to go; the tricky question is "what is a "real food" for Homo sapiens?" Humans are pretty adaptable, yes, but no animal is adapted to do well with EVERY food, even in moderation.

Essentially, why eat anything, even in moderation, that causes one's health to suffer? For example, for me to continue eating wheat despite repeatable personal experience of health alterations and mounds of science on the toxicity of gluten and detrimental effects of gliadin and wheat starches, in the name of "moderation"... sounds to me like ignoring the facts in the name of a phrase that sounds "wisdomy." Wheat is bad for me and I should not consume it, in moderation or otherwise.

Thing is, I'm not an outlier. Assuming you're a human, wheat is bad for you to, along with a lot of other components of modern diets. Sure, tolerance varies, and the effects may be so low-level as to be accepted by our culture as natural "aging." You can live on it. But if you could live better without, then why not? Moderation is, indeed, something that needs to be "moderated." Not everything we eat today is good for you, in moderation or otherwise, except perhaps as compared to starvation.

If you'd prefer to moderately consume things that harm you, great. I drink alcohol, among other things perhaps I "shouldn't." But using the whole "moderation" thing to look wise and reasoned and cast those who care about such things as barking up the wrong tree only has the appearance of being rational, while in fact it requires one to do very little empirical learning and analysis. Sure, science has limits, but so does the "commonsense." It's important that each "moderate" the other. I doubt the dismissive use of a surprisingly empty phrase about "moderation" is going to result in much progress combating the complex, intertwined issues of public health, environmental degradation, and polluted living environment that we find ourselves mired in, where the "moderation" that proved successful for a given culture in the "recent" past may no longer apply. It's more important to understand what, as humans, we physiologically *are,* and to do so it's important that we look further back.

Moderation is only useful if you've defined its parameters, and those parameters are what's being discussed.

My idea of a great discourse on diet and moderation is what Denise Minger posted in her blog recently

http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/08/13/ancestral-health-symposium/

See the middle section on this page, entitled "Paleo and vegetarianism: let’s be friends!"

Denise is one of the most enjoyable, entertaining, and incredible nutrition researchers I've come across in a long time. I stumbled across her blog looking for a good critique on the movie, Forks and Knifes. I wish I could write half as good as she does.

I think the original posting on moderation was the gist that there are a lot of sense in many healthy diets out there. Of course, junk food or food that one suffers inflammation or sensitivity to should be zero-ed out. I recently came across two food sensitivity testing companies, Alcat and SageMedLabs, and I intend in my annual physical next month to find out what foods I'm sensitive too. I suspect Wheat and Corn are two of them but I don't know and won't know until I get the test results back. I'm going with the SageMedLabs test as they work very well with your insurance company to have it covered.

I've been Paleo off the trail for about 16 months and on the trail the only non-paleo items I have are one-minute instant rice and pre-cooked, dehdrated beans. By the way, Denise Minger's article above makes the strong point that the latest Symposium on Paleo Diet shows that it is no longer a single diet but encompasses a wide range of diets and that makes the most sense. Loren Cordain asserts there are about 20 different Paleo diets he has studied in his medical anthropological studies.

Erik, what a remarkably lucid and clearly explained post.

Sometimes it's frustrating to talk with people who haven't bothered to really do their research into these things. I've been forced to figure out why certain ways of eating and exercising don't work for me, because diabetes has serious and often immediate consequences if I don't get it right and understand how and why something does or doesn't work. For some reason the simplistic calories:energy output way of thinking just doesn't work for Type 1 diabetics... at least not most of those I know. More and more these days people are finding that restriction (but not elimination) of carbs and regular exercise are what help control blood sugar levels and mitigate the effects of diabetes. These parameters work for healthy people, too, not just diabetics.

Nutrition is a damningly complex subject. It makes learning about UL and backpacking look like a walk in the park. Perhaps that is why so few people attempt to really learn about it. Also, when you are young your body tends to be resilient, so you might get away with eating bad food and not feel any consequences, but do it over a long enough period then eventually it will catch up with you. I think it is far better to treat your body right from the start and keep this up, as much as possible, throughout your life. Later your body will thank you for it. I know I wish I had known much more about nutrition when I was younger.

"This is a curious statement, Tom. The body has trouble whenever any nutrient is insufficiently provided for, no? The same could be said for carbs when in high intensity workouts... What happens when dietary carbs is inadequate? Hypoglycemia. I'm not sure what you are trying to get at by stating this."

Not really, Miguel. When carbs are exhausted in high intensity workouts, you either slow down or grind to a halt because you can't oxidize either fat or protein fast enough to provide the energy necessary to support the high intensity of your workout. This is something I have had a lot of experience with, and it happens long before you go hypoglycemic, a condition I have never experienced over many, many years of high intensity workouts. When glycogen stores are exhausted, the liver will provide glucose via gluconeogenisis to support fat metabolism. If it is not from dietary sources, it will come from muscle, and that is problematic. When both glycogen and fat are exhausted, energy will be supplied by metabolizing more muscle, and that is even more problematic. Protein is a special case, although losing the fat protecting the organs is also a serious matter.

"Why is there this assumption that the preferred state of being for a healthy organism is high intensity exercise? "

I made no such assumption. If you understood that from my post, I apologize for not being clear. I will say that high intensity exercise, properly used will enable you to perform well at lower intensity under demanding conditions such as high altitude. That is where it fits into my backpacking training. When I was racing seriously, high intensity training was mandatory if I was to remain competitive, but that is a special case that does not apply to the general population.

"Also, you assume that the "higher" and "healthier" state of being for human societies is civilization, as if hunter/gatherers somehow live in a lesser state of being. I'm not sure why you necessarily equate civilization with health. In almost all cases hunter/ gatherers that live their traditional lives tend to be far stronger and healthier than "civilized" equivalents. You have just to take a look at their bodies to see the effects of their lifestyles."

Again, I apologize if you understood that from my post. My feelings on the subject are decidedly mixed. I make no assumptions or value judgments about hunter gatherers' state of being other than that they, like the rest of us, take joy in their existence. I definitely DO NOT equate civilization with health or a healthy life style, although that is partially because we do not take advantage of the opportunities civilization offers us and partially because of the misuse of our knowledge. Optimally used, civilization could offer us the benefits of both worlds. All that said, hunter gatherers face a set of health challenges we do not, and are powerless in the face of the onslaught of "modernity". Their way of life is no bed of roses, and never was. I do not look upon them as "noble savages" or otherwise romanticize them, but view them as one more manifastation of humanity in all its diversity, and a reminder of the price we have paid for what we have achieved and misused so casually. As I said, for me it is a mixed bag.

"That's the thing. There has been a lot of inquiry into why diabetes happens in the first place and why it has become a skyrocketing epidemic in modern societies. Why, for instance, does the optimal lifestyle for a diabetic completely follow the optimal guidelines of the lifestyle for a non-diabetic person? Almost everything I have read points to diabetes being highest among people who ate the least amount of carbs before their lifestyles changed to modern diets. These are also societies that often sustained periods of famine. The theory now is that people prone to diabetes actually carry genes that, in a lifestyle of few carbs and intermittent fasting, helped them survive, because diabetics are prone to getting fat. Only in an environment of constant plenty, constant high calories, and unending access to carbs does diabetes arise. The coping/ survival mechanism that diabetes prone people carry within themselves was never meant to deal with the onslaught of over-nutrition that modern society allows. And the fact that there are so many people getting diabetes says something about the way we eat. Of course, the lack of exercise has a big part in this, too. But as Mark Sisson suggests in "Primal Blueprint", our health depends about 80% on nutrition and only about 20% on exercise."

I have no quarrel with what you say, but I do have this sense that exercise plays a larger part in the problem than Sisson claims. As for the unhealthiness of the modern diet, that is an individual choice. Nobody has to sussist on Big gulps and Doritos, etc, nor do they have to sit on their butts in front of an X-Box all day. I have seen too many people, of both sexes and all races and body types, who don't do that live extremely healthy lives. Those who have a genetic predisposition to diabetes are another matter, one that I am not competent to comment on, but everything I have read and heard from health care professionals leads me to believe that a large percentage of those who contract type 2 diabetes did so as a result of poor diet and lack of exercise.

"This is consistent with my above observation that perhaps a gentler form of keeping active and staying healthy is more natural. This constant drive to perform high intensity exercise is quite unnatural for most of our day-to-day lives. Perhaps we should learn something about long-term health and the problem with over-eating and over-training."

No quarrel with this statement, especially the overeating part, although on behalf of those of us who at one time or another in their lives have chosen the high intensity path as PART of their life style, I will say that it does have it attractions and rewards. Whether it is natural/healthy or not I will leave to individual judgment, but after years of weaving it into my life, I am still going strong at 71 with my knees, hips and ankles in good working order, as are many of my former compatriots. One thing you need to understand is that high intensity training is not, indeed cannot be, constant. It very quickly leads to breakdown. Like everything else in this life, moderation is the key to success.

Edited by ouzel on 11/27/2011 18:53:45 MST.

With out haven read all these long post I ll throw as few things out there:
-Not all carbs or fats are equal. Starch/glucose is fine sucrose and fructose are very bad except in very small amounts. In other words root vegetables are healthy as well as the occasional fruit. Refined flours and sugars are not.
- Saturated and mono saturated fats are fine polyunsaturated and trans fats are very bad for you except in very small amounts. In other words meats, milk, eggs, tropical palm/coconut/ macadamia fats are good for you. The new industrial oils made from cheap subsidized crops are not,ie. corn,soy,rapeseed (canola) ect.
You can see that there is a pattern here: real food is good for you no matter if its high carb or fat. Processed "food" is the cause of a laundry list of disease and you can see it all around you every day.
We are omnivores after all- we can live off either fuel. But, we CAN make our own glucose but we need to consume fat to live.
Now, health is a separate matter from "fuel" you can eat the most horrible processed carcinogenic, diabetes inducing foodstuffs and get an energy boost while running. What concerns me about this is how the "calories in/calories out" crowd refuses to believe that their junk food fuel of choice damages them as well as fuels them because they believe all food is equal and its just a matter of calorie/vitamin density. Therefore if you run around every where and burn calories what you eat doesn't matter. This is pure marketing and I blame this line of thinking for the state of our nations health.
Where a lot of confusion comes in is when ketogenic diets are used for therapeutic reasons. If you are metabolically damaged i.e. you are over weight pre or full blown diabetic ketogetic diets can do wonders for reversing your health- so much so that people who have completely changed their life from it become a little over zealous about low carb ( understandably ). The fact that doctors and the mainstream media seem to be against them and try to deny their success and the mountains of scientific evidence only feeds their zealotry because it feels very much like a conspiracy and they very much want to help others who are suffering from the same diseases they cured themselves of. They are largely right it is a conspiracy -the government pushes food guidelines that help the processed food and pharmaceutical industry and those guidelines are what most doctors go by. This is why the medical establishment is no help to patients who eat a bad diet and only prescribe medications that help mask symptoms while the disease continues to progress until the patient dies.
Magazines who also represent the interest of advertisers have convinced a generation of athletes that those same high profit food stuffs can not only help their performance but are necessary. For example, if you believe that you need a really high amount of protein ( more than you get from a steak )to build muscle explain the muscularity of a bull or the vegetarian gorilla? the increase in athletic performance in the last half century is the triumph of performance enhancing drugs, not supplements and whole grain pasta!
It should be noted that people who have reversed their obesity and diabetes from a ketogenic diet can over time add back more and more carbs. Although sometimes their metabolism is so damaged that they may have to carefully watch their carbs the rest of their life. If you are more or less healthy and only have a few pounds to lose you can still benefit from a ketogentic diet and later add back carbs. the important thing whether you do a keto diet or not is that your source of carbs be whole foods like potatoes, parsnips, carrots and not flour(including whole grains) and sugar.

Edited by MAYNARD76 on 11/28/2011 00:50:35 MST.

I wonder if the Tarahumara could be consider a paleo culture- I don't think anyone would argue that they are indeed a healthy culture (I'd have to rate any culture that runs 100's of miles per month from young to old relatively healthy). Looks like their diet is the antithesis of the "paleo" diet. Beans, corn, rice are important to their diet- their diet is roughly 20-25% protein, 65-70% carbohydrates and 15-20% fat- hardly "paleo". Of course they consume little to no processed foods and their carbohydrates are for the most part complex.

Might be worth someone traveling to Northern Mexico and tell the Tarahumara they have it all wrong- quit running so dam(n) much and get rid of their carbs.

Paleo culture may or may not be healthy but agriculture has historically had its advantages. An agricultural society can produce more food which frees up some people to pursue technological innovatiions. Thats probably why hunter/gather societies didn't invent a lot of stuff, no time. Whatever you think of technological progress the sad fact is advanced technological societies have a way of conquering or peacefully subverting hunter/gather type societies.

So for further reading paleo diet vs. atkins diet vs... I guess the UDA Food Pyramid?

Paleo is used in the context of the paleo diet as a short hand for evolution. As in there is no modern study of biology with out considering evolution and genetics. It grew out of the whole foods movement. Humans have been doing agriculture for only about 10,00 years , industrial processing for about 50, but eat a diet based on meat and root vegetables supplemented with leafy greens and fruit/berries for about 35 million (the paleo era).
Hollywood has severely perverted our sense of history and how humans have lived before the modern era. I would encourage anyone to take a few anthropology classes or read up on it. It would be too time consuming to deconstruct all the misconceptions about history. But the paleo diet is not about reconstructing diet its about using science i.e. biology i.e. evolution to figure out what is and is not healthy to eat. One way to do this is to compare cultures who eat different diets, for instance- if someone says saturated fats cause cancer and heart disease but cultures around the world who eat a high sat fat diet don't have any signs of these diseases it is reasonable to conclude that the hypothesis is incorrect and so on.
It should be noted that grain agriculture and civilization has always been based on slavery and short brutal lives filled with war. Grains and drugs were never meant to be "healthy" just an efficient way to subdue a population by settling them , store food for war and collect taxes.

In practice, depends what you are doing. I doubt the BPL group running the R2R2R this spring will be fueling themselves with cold, leftover BBQ ribs or cold poultry drumsticks in place of carbo-rich goo.

Same thing at camp. You may want no/less sugars for dinner if watching your weight, but some for breakfast or on the trail (though that can come from fruit to keep it real).

"Humans have been doing agriculture for only about 10,00 years , industrial processing for about 50, but eat a diet based on meat and root vegetables supplemented with leafy greens and fruit/berries for about 35 million (the paleo era)."

I don't think humans have been around for 35 million years, Brian, more like 200,000 years. As for agriculture, it seems logical to me that humans would also have included grains in their wild form in their diet. Otherwise how would they have known to domesticate them? I doubt very much it was an epiphany that led them to suddenly start planting wheat, rice, millet, etc, out of the blue.

"Hollywood has severely perverted our sense of history and how humans have lived before the modern era. I would encourage anyone to take a few anthropology classes or read up on it."

What makes you think all the good folks here at BPL get their info on the subject from Hollywood?

"It should be noted that grain agriculture and civilization has always been based on slavery and short brutal lives filled with war. Grains and drugs were never meant to be "healthy" just an efficient way to subdue a population by settling them , store food for war and collect taxes."

Exactly where did you come up with this particular idea? Sources? To be sure, human history has been filled with wars, but also periods of peace and high achievement that have allowed us to progress, in fits and starts to a point where we at least have a chance to reach our full potential, instead of spending most of our waking hours in search of enough food to stay alive and reproduce the next generation. All of this has been the result of having a steady food supply, based on grain, adequate to free a segment of the population up for other activities that have been the basis of human progress. As far as I know, every civilization of any consequence has been based on one or another grain or, in the case of the Incas, grain and potatoes. The problem is not grain, or carbs in general, but, rather, excess consumption.

Regarding just exercise more and you'll lose weight. Sorry, didn't work for me. I was hiking the friggin Pacific Crest Trail for criminy's sake, 25-30 miles a day, and I was already gaining back the weight I had lost. My high-carb diet along with the calorie deficit pretty much hosed my metabolism, and by metabolism I mean I think I became severely insulin-resistent. I gained everything back when I got home without overeating. Yeah, that's right, with a will of steel I had one single victory feast and then went on a diet immediately after the hike and still gained all the weight back and more.

Regarding moderation. Didn't work for me, either. I ate really normal, very healthy but any exercise at all made me ravenously hungry which led me to eat too much. I tried exercising less so I wouldn't be tempted by hunger but I couldn't lose weight. I could only exercise and be miserably hungry and totally preoccupied with food to a point where it interfered with my life. It was clear I had a problem with managing food and energy. I read that a high fat low carbohydrate diet could calm my hunger so I tried it. That's all I really wanted from it.

I have had minimal and slow weight loss in the last 2 months. One belt notch, that's all. But I feel a lot better. I don't have to eat every few hours anymore. My mind isn't pre-occupied with food, which was disorienting until I got used to it. I went backpacking with better, tastier food and needed less of it to stay energetic and satisfied. I postholed in the snow up to my knees for hours without tiring. I've never done that before. I pitched my tent on the snow and slept with just a z-rest under me (but two quilts on top!). I froze and woke up to shiver but I did sleep. This way of eating certainly has restored a resilience I lost hiking the PCT on the "eat whatever you want while you're backpacking" diet.

Edited by sbhikes on 11/28/2011 17:54:45 MST.

"It should be noted that grain agriculture and civilization has always been based on slavery and short brutal lives filled with war. Grains and drugs were never meant to be "healthy" just an efficient way to subdue a population by settling them , store food for war and collect taxes."

I don't think slavery is a precondition for agriculture. On the other hand I do think a lot of the tyrannical empires we've seen would only have been possible with agriculture. I just can't imagine how a society of hunter/gathers could be controlled by a despot or how they could control (or benefit from) a large population of slaves. It would have been nice if we'd stayed hunter/gathers in some ways but aside from the question of progress there's another problem. A agricultural power can raise a professional army and conquer a tribe of hunter/gathers (its been happying since anciet times). So hunter/gathers either die out or modernize themselves to protect against invaders and end up with a stronger more centralized government than can fight off the invaders but it can also us its resources to oppress its people.

Piper if you're happy with your current diet I have no problem with it. My question is if you're keeping up a very active lifestyle (i.e. thru-hiking) and not losing weight could it be that your body is okay at whatever weight it was at? I'm all for healthy living and if you want to drop weight I won't argue with you. I'm just not convinced everyone has to have a perfect body to be healthy. Seems like to me a more important question would be whats your colesteral and heart rate.
At any rate Kudos for sticking with it and making it work! Thats more discipline that a lot of us have.

Edited by Cameron on 11/28/2011 18:21:18 MST.

Interesting posts ("paleo cultures", "history"). What I understand is that the paleolithic diet is really, historically speaking, about 20 different types of diets depending upon the paleolithic culture being studied. Loren Cordain in a You Tube lecture covers this ( http://youtu.be/5dw1MuD9EP4 ). In some, the carbohydrate load is quite heavy (where the people ate lots of tuber, such as native Hawaii Indians who ate lots of Poi (from the Taro root)). In others, the carbohydrate load is very low (such as the historical Eskimos). The commonality of the diet is that instead of grains/legumes (excepting peas)/beans -- they used tubers and other starchy vegetables (such as Yams, Squash), along with vegetables, fruit, nuts, animal. A varied range of macronutrient ratios are involved in these various diets.

A good (and fun piece to read, as she (Denise Minger) is a great writer who entertains as she educates) is here: http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/08/13/ancestral-health-symposium/ where she talks about meeting a meat-free, lacto-ovo paleo dieter/Researcher named Aravind who she writes of:

"I think Aravind summed it up well in a post on Paleohacks:

Paleo is about toxin avoidance. It is not about being a meatasaur, low carber, re-enactor, etc. I am a very proud member of this community and a very strong supporter of the movement. … This community is squandering a huge opportunity to gain the support of a crowd (like me) that is completely on board with the virtues of avoiding neolithic toxins and actually would lend support to our movement."

The whole page there is a great, fun read about the modern Paleo movement and what it shares with vegetarianism.

The other post about how the paleolithic diet prevented mankind as a whole from evolving civilization, that is undoubtedly historically true but not anymore in this day of transportation by air, modern day refrigeration, humidity-controlled food storage lockers. We're able to enjoy a paleolithic-diet without reverting back to the stone age. Whether the farmers are growing vegetables/fruit/nuts/grass-fed free-range cattle or grains/legumes/beans, a division of labor and efficiency of scale can still exist and do exist. I of course feel that organic farming inevitably requires fewer animals per square feet but that doesn't mean we have to abandon the cities, etc. It just means we have to pay a little more for good Organic food.

Edited by marti124 on 11/28/2011 18:50:18 MST.

"Regarding just exercise more and you'll lose weight. Sorry, didn't work for me. I was hiking the friggin Pacific Crest Trail for criminy's sake, 25-30 miles a day, and I was already gaining back the weight I had lost. My high-carb diet along with the calorie deficit pretty much hosed my metabolism, and by metabolism I mean I think I became severely insulin-resistent.I gained everything back when I got home without overeating. Yeah, that's right, with a will of steel I had one single victory feast and then went on a diet immediately after the hike and still gained all the weight back and more"

It sounds like you have a serious physiological problem, Piper. I'd say if the Ketogenic diet works for you, God bless and go for it. I am curious, however, about the makeup of your diet when you were hiking the PCT. Was it mainly carbs? Or was it distributed across carbs, protein, and fat? If so, what were the percentages? There is potentially a lot for us to learn from this, IMO.

Piper- just to be clear, you had lost weight during the earlier portion of the PCT, but you were already gaining weight back before completing the PCT?

if that's true, that flies in the face of everything I've ever experienced or have read about- long days on the trail typically generate such large deficits that regardless of diet choice you can seldom maintain weight (let alone gain weight)

Mike

My trail diet was primarily simple carbs. Candy, cookies, crackers and pasta with artificial cheese powder and real cheese. I resupplied in convenience stores. During a 4-day section I would have one tuna packet or one chicken breast. Sometimes I would remember to put some olive oil in my food. Otherwise it was all candy, cookies, cheese and pasta and crackers.

As for how my body could be "happy at the weight it was", that's hard to say as my weight fluctuated a lot. I lost about 25lbs at first. 125 is my lean thru-hiking weight. I hiked the PCT in two sections. I lost a little more during the High Sierras (probably got to 115) then gained back to 125 on the trail until I got off in Northern California. I gained a little weight back home over the winter and then hit the trail again. I lost back to my 125 thru-hiking weight. Then slowly to the end of the trail I started gaining over my lean thru-hiking weight. I was over 160 when I started this low carb thing.

So far I haven't found steak for breakfast to be much of a hardship, so when it gets too hard, I'll let you know.

This is all interesting; thanks for all the links being posted.

One thing I'd like to say about my earlier post on moderation: I hardly have all this figured out, and if a certain way of eating works for you, makes you feel better, etc., then more power to you. I don't want to come across as having THE answer. I do, however, have to question assertions, coming from any dietary system, that as humans we are "meant" to eat a certain way. It seems to me that there are just too many examples of people in prime health that eat in strikingly different ways; thus my belief that we are adaptable enough to thrive on any smart diet.

But as someone mentioned earlier, "moderation" is a tricky word. Moderate what? How much is "moderate"?

This is highly subjective. If you're eating what you think is a "moderate" amount of ice cream, yet continue to gain weight...well, so much for your idea of moderate. So again, I think it comes back to what works for you. This is where sticking to a general set of rules, as opposed to simply "moderating" makes sense- providng it makes life easier/better for you.

I've actually been interested in "paleo" eating for a while, though I can't say I practice it.

One striking benefit of this diet that has always jumped out in my mind is the lack of processing; no refined carbs, no refined sugars, etc. Think about foods that come in packages...a strict "paleo" diet (what I understand of it anyway), would likely rule 99% of all packaged products out. Similar to the advice I've often heard of "If it comes in a wrapper, has more than a few steps involved in preparing it (talking ingredients, not meals), or you've ever seen an advertisement for it...You probably shouldn't be eating it." This has always struck me as relatively sound advice, though it could be applied to many different styles of eating. It's primarily what I tried to follow in my vegan days.

One question I've always had:
How do endurance athletes do with paleo eating? I've read some of the more strict approaches don't even advocate too much cardio...so that's out for me right off the bat. It's what I enjoy. Closest I can personally think of to a "paleo" endurance athlete would be Ben Greenfield, a triathlete/trainer who's blog I read quite a bit. While not no-carb, he advocates a low-carb diet, far lower than what most endurance athletes would normally consider. He, and many others I've read (as well as Piper above), report lower food cravings and hunger issues, and more even energy levels, supposedly due to more consistent blood sugar throughout the day. This is something I'm curious about...especially as a carb junkie.

Piper- thanks for clarifying- that's very interesting (and baffling) to say the least. I'm curious if anyone has experienced anything similar? Almost everyone I know that has thru hiked has ended up on the "a little too skinny" end of the scale.

I hope the Paleo regime pays off for you, I can certainly understand the frustration of hiking long days and still putting on weight.

Note that yoy can gain weight if you eat more than yr energy output even at higher activity levels

In the dash to the south pole exactly 100 years ago amundsens men gained weight ... This is skiing from the bay of whales through an unknown ice shelf, pionnering the crossing of the axel heilburg glacier and the first crossing o the queen maud mountains .... I believe their diet was around 4500 calories per day

Scott who had a known, an what many consider to be an easier, route but less calories ... Well that ended in tradegy

Unless there is a medical issue, Constant excercise in levels exceeding yr calory input will result in loss of weight ... It took me 3 months+ to notice the difference ... And well over 2 years to reach my "ideal" level

But it works ... It just requires commitement

Google this: famous paleo athletes - a cool example:

http://www.chow.com/food-news/54227/dean-karnazess-extreme-meal-plan/

intro paragraphs:

Dean Karnazes’s
Extreme Meal Plan
Running 1,300 miles makes you very hungry

Few people require as many calories as Dean Karnazes. The San Francisco dad and author of the best-selling memoir Ultramarathon Man has run 350 miles without stopping, fallen asleep while running, won races in 120-degree heat in the desert, and completed a marathon at the South Pole. Last year, Karnazes became the first and only person to run 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days, starting in St. Louis and ending with the New York City Marathon. When he finished, he jogged back to St. Louis again, just because, for a total of 1,300 miles. CHOW was curious to find out what, and how much, a body in such constant motion needs (or wants) to eat. —Lessley Anderson

I know you exercise a lot even when you’re not racing. What do you eat on a normal day?

Post 50 marathons, I am now following what I call the Neanderthal diet. I’m only eating foods that a Neanderthal man would have eaten. So getting away from refined foods and even whole grains. Could we even eat a whole grain when we were cave people? The answer is really no. How could we strip the grain? We ate vegetables, fruits, lean meats, and things we could pick and eat.

[end quote--see link for rest of article]

looks like a lot of carbs to me???????

"What was a typical day like in terms of your diet?

I’d get up at 5:30 in the morning. I was having my physiology monitored, because Chris Carmichael was doing a research study on me. They were looking at the long-term effects of endurance sports on muscle turnover and blood chemistry. I would have a brutal blood draw, then go pee in a cup, and then I’d eat Greek-style yogurt, plain, no sugar added; half a box of Nature’s Path organic granola, peanut butter flavor; and a cup of bananas or berries. That would be my breakfast. Then I’d go run a marathon, come back, and hop in the bus.

After finishing each day’s marathon, I’d have an almond butter sandwich with honey and sliced bananas, and a protein shake by Cytomax. For dinner I’d typically do a mixed organic green salad with almonds, avocado, olive oil, vinegar—we had some good balsamic vinegar—and either a large piece of salmon—we had backup smoked if we could not get it fresh—or even canned salmon, which actually has a lot of Omega-3s in there. And lots of fruit—maybe an apple, pear, orange, berries, peach, and cantaloupe."

I think that if it weren't for having been harmed from 40+ years of the standard American diet, a moderate approach could have worked for me. Research seems to show that fructose (which constitutes 1/2 of table sugar and a little more than 1/2 of high fructose corn syrup) is particularly destructive. If I had never eaten so much of it through my life, I probably could have gone through life without insulin resistance. By "so much" I do not mean that I sat around binging on sugar and drinking liters of soda (I have never purchased a Big Gulp), what I mean is that I ate enough of it to harm me and so I never responded normally to a diet of normal healthy food. My father once told me I was insulin resistant and he was probably right.

Other than not eating sugar or other foods that raise blood sugar (such as grains and fruit), I switched out all my fat from vegetable oils to animal fats and sometimes a little coconut oil. This is probably the most controversial aspect of the diet: all that saturated fat.

After hiking the PCT my feet hurt a lot. They hurt for 2 years afterwards. I tried barefoot running and wearing huaraches sandals for everything, figuring all I needed to do was strengthen my feet. They still hurt. I also got something called "frozen shoulder" which is common among older women and nobody knows what the cause or cure is. The change from "healthy" oils to saturated animal fat made the pain in my feet and frozen shoulder disappear. Someone told me it was probably the inflammation of the seed oils that kept me in pain and eliminating them has made the difference.

I honestly believe that seed oils are far more dangerous than grains, but I avoid both now. I don't see a need to eat grains. On backpack trips I'll probably bring some noodles or crackers unless I figure out something better to eat, but in my regular life, a little sweet potato or yam every now and then is sufficient.

I know that I'm not totally cured, even if "curing" anything is possible. I mean, I have lost very little weight even though I calculated my calories yesterday and they didn't even clear 1000 and yesterday I actually ate some lunch, something I don't do every day. I'm probably permanently screwed as far as weight loss. Oh well. I can still hike. That's all that matters.

"Piper- thanks for clarifying- that's very interesting (and baffling) to say the least. I'm curious if anyone has experienced anything similar? Almost everyone I know that has thru hiked has ended up on the "a little too skinny" end of the scale."

Actually, it is fairly common for women to start gaining weight before the end. Look at pictures of thru-hikers in the trail journals. The men end up emaciated but not the women. I'd be surprised if you could find a single emaciated woman.

Since I resupplied as I went, I ate stuff that was easy to buy and easy to eat. A typical day on the PCT:

Breakfast:
Fig Newtons, or granola bars, or grape nuts with nuts, dried fruit and Nido

2nd Breakfast:
Cookies, or poptarts

Lunch:
Hummus with crackers (sometimes I'd put olive oil in the hummus), or just the crackers, candy

Snack:
Candy, or a layer of Pepperidge farm cookies or a half dozen Oreos or a 4-serving packet of instant pudding with Nido

Dinner:
1L pot filled as far as possible with Orzo pasta with 1 packet of Alfredo cheese sauce powder and chunks of Swiss Gruyere cheese. Sometimes add tuna or chicken.

Dessert:
Candy

Part of the problem with my terrible food choices were the mosquitoes through the entire state of Oregon and the rain through almost all of Washington. I could never sit down. I had to stuff my food under a headnet while I was walking. M&Ms, crackers and cookies are easier to stuff under a headnet than a sandwich or hummus and crackers.

The other problem was heat. So many good foods do not last when it's 90 degrees all day long. Candy melts, cheese gets really gross, vegetables get really stinky, even used tuna packets get really stinky. I didn't want to carry stuff that was too messy. It was hot in So Cal during the day and blazing hot in Nor Cal, day and night.

Regarding slow weight loss, you may find a tape measure becoming more useful than a scale. I ran across a blog posting a little while ago with a photo of the same person at the same weights.

"I don't think humans have been around for 35 million years, Brian, more like 200,000 years. As for agriculture, it seems logical to me that humans would also have included grains in their wild form in their diet. Otherwise how would they have known to domesticate them? I doubt very much it was an epiphany that led them to suddenly start planting wheat, rice, millet, etc, out of the blue."

Yes modern humans haven't been around that long but our distant ancestors have been here since the primal sludge, either way the point is we have been hunter gathers for the overwhelming majority of our existence.
As for wild grains? We can speculate in times of real desperation -if the time of the year was right for grains to be budding- some one could have hand milled a little to eat. That is a far,far cry from a diet that include grains in any real regular way. Grains are a lot of work for very little gain. Look it up - compare whole grain bread to a carrot or a leafy green of your choice. Leafs can be easily picked and roots dug up and thrown onto a fire. You can not eat a wheat berry with out a lot of labor and we haven't gotten into the grains natural toxic defenses against your digestive system. Cultivation most likely started as part of permaculture/horticulture but the ability to store grains gave rise to wealth and the ability to collect taxes in a way even pastoralism could not.


"What makes you think all the good folks here at BPL get their info on the subject from Hollywood?"

From what they say? But Im including all my discussions over the years on this site about this topic. We all know the true Hollywood story: Man lived a short brutal life in a state of perpetual starvation, He died young with no art or language and would have gotten heart disease from eating fatty bison if only he lived long enough for the symptoms to manifest. I took anthropology classes in college for fun, I know these things are not true in any way.

"Exactly where did you come up with this particular idea? Sources?"
It should be required reading: The art of not being governed- by James C. Scott
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Not-Being-Governed-Anarchist/dp/0300152280
It is common knowledge that everyone from the Greeks to the Aztecs was based on a large system of Slavery. Meat was usually forbidden and reserved for the upper classes.

"The problem is not grain, or carbs in general, but, rather, excess consumption."

I would word it like this": the problem isn't carbs its grain and sugars. Contrary to popular belief obesity is a sign of malnutrition not simply over consumption, or in other words over-consumption and low energy is a symptom of obesity not a cause.
see Gary Taubes http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322543879&sr=1-1

I would like to clear something up- the Paleo diet is not a low carb diet! In fact the over whelming majority of paleo cultures eat a diet based on root vegetables as well as meats. Were people get confused is what I tried to get across in my earlier post. Ketgenic diets have a very strong therapeutic effect for obesity and diabetes so many people go this root on the paleo/wholefood diet. Over time when one metabolism has healed they may be able to add healthy carbs back in their diet.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. I did not read his whole book but I have seen his talk on youtube and have read his blog and skimmed both his books at the bookstore.

I do not weigh myself. I've lost one notch on my belt loop. I can still wear my fat pants. The love handle flaps on the sides of my belly are almost flat but otherwise I look almost the same. But it's only been two months.

I feel I have a lot more endurance without carbs and with a body that is able to burn fat. I think people have it backwards. You need carbs for fast energy but not for slow energy.

I do a low carb approach because I am older, I'm at that magic age for women where anything we used to do doesn't work to keep us fit anymore. I also think that my tendency to favor sweets means I should avoid carbs. I also have read Michael Eades and Kurt Harris and they both make the most sense.

Sure I could load up on nice healthy fruit but after my first half of the PCT I attempted to keep the weight off eating only peaches and grapefruit. The weight came back so fast I could see the changes daily in the mirror.

There's some debate over how much fruit ancient humans would have eaten. The fruit in my own foodshed is small and bitter and not abundant year round. The humans who lived here before Western man lived high on the hog foodwise, but they had so much easily obtained food that they were sedentary (as a culture) and thus engaged in warfare protecting their territory. There's no strong line between agriculture and hunter-gatherer. The "agricultural revolution" probably wasn't so much a revolution of growing grains but a revolution of the idea of private property and slavery.

Anyway, my broken metabolism has opened a door to a potentially new way to shave some weight off my pack. I could do it the old way and carry loads and loads of food so that I can eat every couple of hours, or I can do it the new way and be happily not eating with my energy high and no hunger and eat less frequent meals.

"Yes modern humans haven't been around that long but our distant ancestors have been here since the primal sludge, either way the point is we have been hunter gathers for the overwhelming majority of our existence."

Ah, yes, bacteria. The ultimate hunter gatherers. ;)

"As for wild grains? We can speculate in times of real desperation -if the time of the year was right for grains to be budding- some one could have hand milled a little to eat. That is a far,far cry from a diet that include grains in any real regular way. Grains are a lot of work for very little gain. Look it up - compare whole grain bread to a carrot or a leafy green of your choice. Leafs can be easily picked and roots dug up and thrown onto a fire. You can not eat a wheat berry with out a lot of labor"

I suspect it was a bit different than that, Brian. Grain, by its very seeding habit, grows naturally in fairly dense stands. Hunter gatherers were intimately familiar with the life cycles of their various food sources, and timed their movements to be "in the right place at the right time", ie when fruits were ripe, fish were running, etc. Grain, before it dries out into a form suitable for storage can be chewed raw. Try it sometime. It can also be soaked to soften it even further. All that one needs do is to take a seed head, rub it between your palms to separate the berries from the outer husks, and start chewing, then spit out the inners husks. My point is that hunter gatherers could not have afforded to overlook any fod source and that it was this kind of experience over a long period that eventually led some bright guy/gal to get the bright idea of planting the seeds themselves and thereby ensure a more predictable source of food. There is no way it would have come as a sudden "Saul on the road to Damascus" revelation and,voila!, amber waves of grain sprang forth.

"We all know the true Hollywood story: Man lived a short brutal life in a state of perpetual starvation, He died young with no art or language and would have gotten heart disease from eating fatty bison if only he lived long enough for the symptoms to manifest. I took anthropology classes in college for fun, I know these things are not true in any way."

I don't believe that, and neither do a lot of other people, I'd bet. That said, while some may have survived to a ripe old age 30,000 years ago, I doubt very much if as many did as do today. Do you have any way of determining average life expectancies from that period? Infant mortality? How many survived past puberty?
We have a pretty good handle on that kind of thing today, but I doubt very much if that is the case for populations back then. The art and the language are fairly well accepted by most educated people these days.

"It is common knowledge that everyone from the Greeks to the Aztecs was based on a large system of Slavery. Meat was usually forbidden and reserved for the upper classes."

It is apparently not so commonly known that hunter gatherers in the Kodiak Archipelago kept slaves, as did many Native American tribes. Slavery also has a long history in Africa. Nomadic peoples such as the Mongols also took slaves. My point here is that slavery is not dependent on agriculture, but rather stems from human traits that we are slowly evolving beyond.

http://faculty.washington.edu/fitzhugh/kod1.html

"I would word it like this": the problem isn't carbs its grain and sugars. Contrary to popular belief obesity is a sign of malnutrition not simply over consumption, or in other words over-consumption and low energy is a symptom of obesity not a cause."

I have no problem with your statement as regards sugar. When it comes tto grain, I disagree. As I said earlier every civilization of note had been based on a grain. Lets take the two with the longest continuity, China and India. The diet of millions of lean, fit peasants in both countries is based on rice and, to a lesser extent, wheat, supplemented by a wide variety of vegetables, legumes, fruits, and a small amount of meat when it can be obtained. It has been this way for millenia. These people don't have a weight problem in general, nor do they seem to be suffering from the effects of grain toxicity. I've seen them up close in both countries. The weight/energy problems in those countries invariably come with affluence, as is increasingly the case as people move into the middle class and upper class and begin indulging in excess consumption of processed food rich in unhealthy fats, meat, and sugar, while no longer engaging in the vigorous exercise required to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows.

Many thanks, BTW, for clearing up some of my misconceptions about the Paleo diet. It is clearly a healthy diet, but not the only one, IMO.

A lot of those of us here who are attempting to explain the paleo diet are also in the process of learning about it. We are not the ones who have spent years studying it and doing experiments and real world trials, including years of personal trials. So to take us to task to try to explain what we are learning without doing the research and reading yourself is a bit lopsided. What paleo-nutritionists are attempting to do is discover, through scientific inquiry, what the optimal way of eating is for a human being. There are no hard and fast rules saying this food is automatically bad, but rather, through tests and observation and personal trials, a gradual elimination and categorization of foods that do us harm or cause sub-optimal performance. It's a young discipline, with still a lot to learn, all the time discarding previous misconceptions. Unless you have read the research that these scientists and doctors are putting together, I don't see how you can just dismiss what they are saying. They specifically want to AVOID fad diets, so they do the experiments and research in order to get at the truth. Most of it is very good science, and freely shared on the Internet, with lots of revisions to earlier beliefs, and in that way very different from the Atkins Diet.

Others can resist the notion of a range of healthy recommendations all they want, especially the emerging knowledge coming out about grains, but the truth is that there is a very real, very visible, and very persistent problem with obesity in American (and to a lesser extent elsewhere). People are unnaturally fat. And getting worse all the time. Prople's exercise habits have not changed that drastically in the last 50 years, and yet obesity rates have risen to epidemic proportions. SOMETHING besides lack of exercise is causing this. Paleo research is showing more and the culprits as being wheat and sugar. Nothing else explains it as well. And nothing so effectively works at treating the problem as the elimination of these the things from the diet.

I was a die-hard vegetarian, rarely eating processed foods, before I became diabetic.And I did far more exercise thatost people ever due. I still got fat and diabetic. The paleo diet has changed all that.

But the Paleo diet is just that...another fad diet sure to be followed by many others in the months/years to come. Just you watch ; ).

John, one form of this research is called "paleo", and there are other names like "primal", "Neanderthal", "neanderthin", "caveman", you name it. It's not theme that matters, but the science behind the nutrition and the way the body works with different nutrients and accompanying lifestyle (every paleo or primal account I've read always emphasized plenty of exercise). I'm read Philip Maffetone's "Big Book of Endurance Training" right now and, though he doesn't call it that, his recommendations for eating and nutrition are completely consistent with the primal philosophy. If you eat this way you will get optimal results... if you eat another way you will get damaging results.

I've never followed a food fad before (unless you can call vegetarianism a fad), but this is the first way of eating and living that has actually had a real life, measurable impact on my diabetes and health. It's spreading in the diabetes community like wildfire, because, for the first time in their lives many of them are finally able to control their blood sugars and live a normal life. Diabetics are not particularly special in terms of what they need to be healthy... All they need to do is follow a diet and lifestyle that doesn't deviate from the optimum balance of food, exercise, lack of stress, and sleep. In other words a healthy way of living that is good for anyone. A fad diet would do diabetics no good, since their lives literally depend on it.

Again, read Maffetone. Very comprehensive and lucid explanation of how train and eat.

Edit: When I started reading Maffetone's book, I hadn't known that he advocated "lesser" carbohydrate intake. It was a pleasant surprise to find that he had come up with this in the 1970's, way before all the paleo hoopla now.

If you'd like to see what it is all about without committing it try Maffetone's "Two Week [carbohydrate] Test".
It should give you immediate results that you may never have seen before. Basically it tests your tolerance for carbs.

Edited by butuki on 11/30/2011 22:44:55 MST.

Piper, what really strikes me about your thru-hike diet is that it seems terribly deficient in protein, especially considering the amount of exercise you were getting. Maybe, despite the exercise, you were steadily losing muscle mass--and that muscle mass is what burns calories (loss of muscle mass = lower metabolism). So, now, though you aren't seeing a big weight loss, you may be building back your muscle mass, which may help repair your damaged metabolism. If you don't do any weight training now, you may find that adding that in may help with losing inches.

I, too, have followed a low carb diet in the past, and found that it really did help tame my appetite, with no loss of energy (after the initial adjustment period). I had hikes of 20 miles with 5,000+ feet of elevation gain in one day while consuming virtually NO carbs, and found that running off of stored fat really worked for me.

Luke

Time was not the reason hunter gathers did not invent stuff. They most likely had more free time them we do. It is really about control. What is technology but controlling our environment.

An agricultural society is one that has taken control of there food supply, humans are unique in this respect. This control increases the food supply which in turn increases the population, which in turn would increase the need for land for agriculture, hence the conquering and subverting you mentioned. The reason technological innovations occurred is because of the increased population, ie more brain power and food now cost money, it is under someones control. People now had to work for it, and that work was decoupled from the attainment of food. That work was put towards the control of other aspects of our environment. People actually had less free time, they where working under someones thumb. The ability to go out around your current area and take what food you needed was gone.

You are right hunter gathers did either have to assimilate into the machine or face annihilation. Before agriculture war was not made as an all out conquest as we know it today. It was more or less a game of tag, to let everyone know where everyone was. The intention of utter destruction or assimilation did not occur till the agricultural revolution. That is why these simple tribes where wiped out so easily. They were playing a different game. They did not know the rules had changed.

I recommend reading Ishmael by: Daniel Quinn
and
Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollen

Edited by WalkSoftly33 on 12/01/2011 00:50:06 MST.

Piper

In 2010, all but one of the female AT thru hikers I met ether gained weight or stayed the same. Granted that is not nearly as big of a demographic as the males but still it is a data pool.

I think it may have something to do with building muscle and adding weight on that way even though some pounds of fat may come off.

This has me thinking about control. This struggle we have to understand. I feel as though all of our "knowledge" has only gotten us further away from understanding.

Take our current discussion on our desire to know what is best to eat. We try to control everything, to break it down into words and numbers, carbs, fats, and proteins. To categorize it all to an ever more finite minutia. We as a people think that we understand if we do this. So we continue to break things down, study, observe and "advance". This has created a great consternation with in our societies. There are hundreds of studies all saying something different. The consumption of food to sustain our persons has become a myriad of choices, one day something is a heart attack waiting to happen, then next a miracle food. This increase in choices creates an atmosphere of doubt, anxiety and stress. As other studies have shown, stress kills! Oh great now my mental exercise to eat the healthiest diet is unhealthy, its killing me!

HAHA At a certain point I feel like just laughing at the tizzy that we get our selves in. Just these last few days personally I have gotten my self in one, not about food, but now Im laughing cause it is just silly.

I mean I have never see an animal struggle with what is best for it to eat. A tree does not contemplate the different types of soil around, or air it breathes. They seem to live with a certain understanding that we have forgotten or do not know.

The fact about us is we really do not know. We don't know what is the best thing to eat. Agriculture allowed us to take matters into our own hands. We took control of our food and much more, But when it comes down to it we have a very simple understanding of the world. We need to organize things just so. An excel spreadsheet charting foods eaten, calories in calories out, All boxed away in a grid. Well the world is not a grid, it is a swirly whirly gum drop. Maybe the desire to control is not the path to take. It seems to me and this is just my observation, that we are all mixed up. Our constant contemplation for knowledge and control has created a huge distraction from actually living in the KNOW.

I think why we sometimes harken back to hunter gathers and what they where eating is because deep down, we know that we are mixed up. We know that the more that we have dissected, our thoughts, the world and striven for knowledge that we have gotten away from something. We think maybe, just maybe they were living a little more like that tree. Maybe they were on to something there.

"There is no way it would have come as a sudden "Saul on the road to Damascus" revelation and,voila!, amber waves of grain sprang forth."

No I never tried to insinuate that its was necessarily that sudden. But it was only 10,00 years ago that the first tiny percentage of human beings began what anthropologist call agriculture. Im getting sucked into explaining something that is too big for the internet. We are also going off a tangent from diet philosophy to archeology and anthropology. I will never be able to answer that question to your satisfaction online but I would start with James C Scott.
But let me inject a grey area here, Its only gluten grains that are really not good for you. Buckwheat and rice are perfectly fine if you are not already suffering from obesity and diabetes. But they still are not as good as other non grain foods. Another twist is the fact that traditionally grains like wheat are prepared with some form of soaking/fermentation process. This could be anything from traditional sourdough bread to beer. Soaking and fermenting removes a lot of the phytates and lectins. In other words traditionally people had strategies to make grain more edible and less harmful. We no longer prepare our grains this way in the industrial age , its not conducive to fast modern processing. The paleo diets philosophy is to just drop this food and concentrate on more optimal food sources. After all, we are not poor peasants we can freely choose anything in the world to eat.
It should be noted that wholefoods dieters do eat wheat but they make or seek out real sourdough bread in small bakerys or they buy sprouted bread like the Ezekiel brand.

"That said, while some may have survived to a ripe old age 30,000 years ago, I doubt very much if as many did as do today."

You're right about that! Modern medical science is a miracle. I would not want to live in world without it.

"Do you have any way of determining average life expectancies from that period? Infant mortality? How many survived past puberty?"

Yes, Archaeology! They study the health and nutrition of past cultures. Its certainly true that there is still a lot to know but they do know a decent amount from bones and food refuge and vessels. But your forgetting that hunter gather cultures have survived into modern times and studies have been done on them. We know a decent amount about their diets and health. It is fair to question how much they are like ancient hunter gathers- but we can learn a lot about diet by comparing their diet and health to ours.

"My point here is that slavery is not dependent on agriculture, but rather stems from human traits that we are slowly evolving beyond'

Your right, slavery exist out side of agriculture but agriculture is historically very dependent on slavery even up to the southern plantations and an echo survives even today with the exploitation of poorer immigrants on modern farms. Also, some of those African and American cultures were agricultural societies some of them were an agrarian mixture of sorts. There isn't always a clear line between hunter gather/pastoralism/agricultural. Thankfully modern technology allows us to do a lot more with a lot less manual labor needed.

"China and India. The diet of millions of lean, fit peasants in both countries is based on rice and, to a lesser extent, wheat, supplemented by a wide variety of vegetables, legumes, fruits, and a small amount of meat when it can be obtained."

Earlier in my post I point out that rice is gluten free. So Im not surprised they don't suffer its effects. We should point out that while they may be lean peasants are stereotypically shorter than the ruling classes. In India they eat a lot of dairy, in Asia they eat everything that moves! Neither culture had refined sugar.
I should make it clear sugar is defiantly worse than grain! if you eat grain but no sugars you will be pretty healthy, it you eat sweet potatoes instead of bread you will be healthier still- according to the paleo diet.

"The weight/energy problems in those countries invariably come with affluence, as is increasingly the case as people move into the middle class and upper class and begin indulging in excess consumption of processed food rich in unhealthy fats, meat, and sugar, while no longer engaging in the vigorous exercise required to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows."

I have to disagree with this. It is a fact that wealthier people are on average much leaner and healthier than poor people in this country. I think its easily explained by the much better quality of food the wealthy eat compared to the cheap easily available junk foods everyone else is eating. Think Wholefoods market and nice pricey restaurants where the chef would not use anything less than local organic ingredients. As modern countrys get affluent they start eating our junk food.

Personally Im not a strict paleo dieter. I am into whole foods. I defiantly respect the paleo movement and follow the blogs. It is always revising itself when new info comes out.
Bottom line for me is to eat clean organic pastured whole foods. Leave out the industrial cooking oils , chemical flavorings and preservatives, Cheap fillers, and sugars. Cook like great grandma used too in butter and grease. Cook at home and you should be able enjoy good health.

Clint,
1+ to your whole post!

Think of the paleo movement in this way: people have gotten very confused about what constitutes healthy food, what they should be eating. The fad diets, and just the very need to have diets at all, clearly shows that people don't know what it is they should be eating for their health. A lot of people who have tried different kinds of diets and health trends for years, never managed to lose the weight they needed to lose and ended up right back where they started from.

People like Loren Cordain and Art Delaney decided to delve into the whole question of what constitutes the optimum diet for human beings and reasoned that our bodies evolved during a time when we were hunter gatherers, a time that spans the bulk of our 2 million year history. From paleoarcheological studies of human skeletons and fossils, there was a sudden spike in the advent of modern diseases right at the same time that agriculture started to be used to feed ourselves. Before that humans had evolved to the point where our bodies pretty much fit into the kinds of food and lifestyles that hunter-gathering necessitated. WIth almost 2 million years to develop this way, naturally our bodies followed suit, adjusting to certain kinds of food and certain kinds of activity. Critics bring up the wide distribution of humans around the planet, but in general the kinds of food that people could obtain by hunting and gathering was on the whole similar wherever we went. None of it was from husbandry and mass planting. (by the way it isn't true that humans are unique in terms of farming and agriculture. Many kinds of social insects have done it far longer than we have, notably ants and termites and bees. Other kinds of insects and bees and even fish care for domesticated "cattle")

Paleo attempts to gather information about archeology, anthropology, nutrition, exercise, etc., and determine what is the optimal combination of circumstances akin to how we lived during our longest run of natural selection, reasoning that if we can recreate those circumstances then that is probably the optimum way for us to live and eat today. During most of our history we didn't have the huge access to certain kinds of food that we do today (many studies show that while we have volume of food, the variety of our food choices is far, far smaller than what the average hunter gatherer ate everyday, especially in regard to vegetables). We were quite restricted to certain kinds of food that we were able to gather and get at. Anything else, including many things that require cooking and special preparation techniques, was simply out of our palette.

Paleo tries to recreate this restriction from the past, while still remaining in the modern age. Some people, like Roy Mankovitz (The Original Diet: The Omnivore's Solution), go way beyond what most of us would willingly do, by trying to completely replicate how paleolithic hunter-gatherer's must have lived, including as much as possible eating the original food sources, even going so far as to advocate eating certain kinds of nutrition-laden soils. The main question though always remains the basis of paleo thinking: what is the best way for us to eat if we look at archeology and anthropology?

The point is our bodies evolved like that of any other animal, and even though we are omnivorous it doesn't mean that we can eat anything. Just like alcohol and tobacco, in spite of certain foods being edible and non-fatal, there are still a lot of things which are simply unhealthy for us to eat. More and more evidence is especially pointing to sugar and wheat.

Paleo doesn't say that wheat and sugar are impossible to eat... many animals have evolved to eat them and thrive on them... but that at this point in our evolution we haven't yet evolved to eat them and retain our health. 10,000 years is just not enough time to evolve. There are studies that show groups of people around the world who managed, due to being isolated from the rest of the world, to evolved certain characteristics that helped them to eat food that is not healthy for the majority of the population, such as a group of people in Swiss mountains (Loetschental Valley) who seem to have developed the ability to take in milk without ill side effects like lactose intolerance. But these developments are rare.

What is surprising is that following the paleo way of eating is not difficult. You simply reduce, as much as possible, the amount of carbs you eat, particularly refined carbs like sugar and white flour. You don't need to keep charts or count calories or think in percentages or anything like that. By eating the amount of healthy fat that you do, your satiety is naturally taken care of. You just have to make sure that you get plenty of vegetables, a goodly amount of protein, and fill the rest with fat from fish, olive oil, nuts, and meat.

Why should sugar be eliminated?
Traditional hunter-gatherer societies highly value honey.

(Nb I am not advocating the constant consumption of sugary snacks/drinks prevalent in the Western diet)

Traditional hunter-gatherer societies highly value honey.

You did notice I wrote, "reduce as much as possible".

Yes they valued honey, but honey was extremely difficult to come by and could only be enjoyed on rare occasions. No one said that you can never enjoy any of the joyful things in life. But in our world today we indulge far too often in food that our bodies just can't handle in the amounts we subject them to. If those societies had spent all their time eating honey, doubtless it would have harmed them, too, unless, like some animals, they had developed a tolerance for it.

Your last statement answers your own question.

(by the way it isn't true that humans are unique in terms of farming and agriculture. Many kinds of social insects have done it far longer than we have, notably ants and termites and bees. Other kinds of insects and bees and even fish care for domesticated "cattle")

Miguel

In what ways do the above species farm/ care for domesticated cattle or food?

I can see that where there are bees there are flowers, where there are no flowers there are no bees and where there are no bees there are no flowers. It is a symbiotic relationship, you could even argue they are the same organism. (I recently saw a program showing people, I think in Japan(?), hand pollinating flowering trees because something had wiped out the local bee population, to keep the tree species alive, the tree could not survive with out the bees, or substitute bees)

Do bees wipe out competitors to its food source? Or wipe out the food source of its competitors. Or plant more flowers and take over areas that once belonged to another species?

Do these fish protect there cattle and wipe out competing fish. As humans almost did to say the North American Wolf protecting our "cattle". Do gangs of these fish attack other gangs of these fish in an all out war to take there current crop of cattle? Do these fish breed there cattle together?


I guess my question to you is in your opinion how are these farming practices by these animals similar to us, how are they different?

If you would take the time to answer I would appreciate it, as I am interested in this topic.

Thanks

All of this makes sense.

The difficulty is determining what our ancestors ate. The diets of the Inuit differ from those people who lived in tropical rain forests. But there are probably some commonalities. More than likely almost all of them ate meat, fish, fowl. And for the most part (over ~ 10,000 years ago) other foods were gathered, not grown. And when we look at meat & fowl, we need to determine what those ancient animals and bird ate themselves.

Plus those ancient peoples probably got more exercise in a day than many modern people get in a month. So it comes down to lifestyle and food to me.

Agriculture allowed people to store food for long periods of time, mitigating some of the problems with climate cycles and also allowed some members more time to engage in activities other than survival. This part is good because excess production allows humans to engage in technology, art, literature, and music. That is part of what we are. So are we now evolving or de-evolving? I am afraid it might be the later.

"So are we now evolving or de-evolving?"

Depends on whether or not you use some recent BPL forum activity as a guide....... ;-)

Depends on whether or not you use some recent BPL forum activity as a guide....... ;-)



Now that is funny!

"Depends on whether or not you use some recent BPL forum activity as a guide....... ;-)"

LOFL

"Depends on whether or not you use some recent BPL forum activity as a guide....... ;-)"

Recent? Puleeeeze.

"So to take us to task to try to explain what we are learning without doing the research and reading yourself is a bit lopsided."

I must be getting sloppy with my language, Miguel, because you persist in reading the worst into my post. I am not taking you or anybody else to task. This is a discussion on a subject that I find very interesting and which has given me a lot to think about, and also have studied to a fair degree from a different perspective. However, when I encounter a statement that I disagree with, I feel it is my right to register my disagreement, accompanied by my reasoning. My impression to date is that you find this offensive, and I am sorry for that, but it will not cause me to cease posting. To be clear, I am NOT taking Paleo studies, OR the Paleo diet in its entirety, lightly. There is one main area that I find problematic for the general population, by which I mean those who are not trying to lose weight or suffer from type 2 diabetes, and that is the ketogenic diet. There is ample evidence to prove that humans, indeed all mammals, are designed to use glucose as a substrate for metabolism, along with fat and a small amount of protein. Google up "mammals AND glycogen" if you don't believe me, or "primates AND glycogen". This is more than enough to convince me that hunter gatherers never lived in a constant state of ketosis, rather than exclusively when they were short of food. Nor should most modern humans. Brian's explanation of the Paleo diet convinced me that it is a perfectly viable diet for those who choose it, but by no means the only one, much less the optimal one. That remains to be determined. To those who choose the ketogenic diet, I wish them well and hope they remain healthy over the long term.

"Others can resist the notion of a range of healthy recommendations all they want, especially the emerging knowledge coming out about grains, but the truth is that there is a very real, very visible, and very persistent problem with obesity in American (and to a lesser extent elsewhere). People are unnaturally fat. And getting worse all the time. Prople's exercise habits have not changed that drastically in the last 50 years, and yet obesity rates have risen to epidemic proportions."

I will refer you back to my previous observations about civilizations being based on grains. They have been remarkably successful for millenia, including here in America up until about 40-50 years ago. What has changed is that people are growing more sedentary, stressed by modern life, and taking an increasing part of their food from extremely unhealthy sources, eg refined sugar, white flour carbs, etc, and are constantly bombarded with advertisements for unhealthy food. To make matters worse, food is everywhere. Contrary to what you say, people's exercise habit HAVE changed in the last 50 years. That is so well established as to be unworthy of argument. Kids are spending more time inside, either watching TV, playing video games, twittering, etc, and less time moving around. Physical education is rarely offered in schools anymore. It was mandatory when I was a kid,and when school was out we were out the door to play sports and run around. No one drove a car to school, we walked. Today the school parking lots of high schools are fulls of student cars, and younger kids ride a bus to school. The same goes for a lot of adults, regarding a sedentary life style. It is no surprise, given the above, that there is an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes, both of which were rare 50 years ago.

"I don't see how you can just dismiss what they are saying."

I do NOT dismiss what they are saying. I didn't know first hand a lot of what they are saying, at least until this thread. I do, and shall continue to, question the ketogenic diet for the general population, as well as the statements made here by some that the Paleo diet is the answer to mankind's dietary problems. It is much more complicated than that.

Recent? Puleeeeze

That would make almost everyone in this thread a past contributing member of the Neanderthal Degenerates Club. :-P

(paleo humor, un-sugar-coated)

Tom, I must be getting sloppy, too, because I certainly wasn't making a veiled referral only to you; I was just making a general observation towards everyone here showing so much skepticism towards those of us bringing up the paleo offering. In the past I have always named you directly when I was discussing things with you, haven't I? I have always respected your opinions. Please don't feel I was attacking you.

Also, in this whole discussion, not once did I feel anger about any of the arguments. I was only a little frustrated that a lot of people were making counter arguments without having read up and learned how the sugar/ fat system works. Two years ago I couldn't have said the first thing about this topic, but I've read a Hell of a lot since then and am beginning to get a handle on what it is about. It is by no means an easy topic to get your head around.

Your observations... the earlier ones included... Have made me stop and think about what I've learned and to remember to look at the knowledge I have with a healthy sense of caution. And to be honest, I just don't know enough about nutrition and the biochemistry behind it to properly reply to you. If I tried to I'd be solely popping off conjecture.

It would be interesting to do a study on what kind of energy source hunter-gatherer's today use for most of their activities. Fat-based or sugar-based. From all I've read it would seem to be mainly (but not completely), fat-based. It would be enlightening to learn what it really is.

Edited by butuki on 12/01/2011 20:33:45 MST.

" In the past I have always named you directly when I was discussing things with you, haven't I? I have always respected your opinions. Please don't feel I was attacking you."

Thanks, Miguel. That makes me feel a whole lot better. It would bother me a lot if I thought I had lost your respect, which is reciprocated, by the way. I guess I just assumed based on the proximity of your post to mine, speaking of sloppy.

In what ways do the above species farm/ care for domesticated cattle or food?

a bit off-piste, but a couple of fun links:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/leafcutterants.jsp

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071009212548.htm

"It would be interesting to do a study on what kind of energy source hunter-gatherer's today use for most of their activities. Fat-based or sugar-based. From all I've read it would seem to be mainly (but not completely), fat-based. It would be enlightening to learn what it really is.'

In genral it seems that people in tropical climate eat more carbs and people up north eat more meat. This is easily explained by the seasons. There is a lot less plants to eat in the winter.

Lots of good info on this in this list of blog post:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/Kitava

http://thatpaleoguy.blogspot.com/2011/09/coconut-and-starchy-vegetable.html

"{The ideal diet for humans includes a lot of possibilities. I believe the focus on macronutrients is misguided. There are examples of cultures that were/are healthy eating high-fat diets, high-carbohydrate diets and everything in between. What they do not eat is processed grains, particularly wheat, refined sugar, industrially processed seed oils and other modern foods. I believe these are unhealthy, and this is visible in the trail of destruction they have left around the globe. Its traces can be found in the Pacific islands, where close genetic relatives of the Kitavans have become morbidly obese and unhealthy on a processed-food diet." - Stephan Guyenet

I wanted to add you should continue with your low carb diet. Many people have found it works wonders for their health. Over time you may find you can add in more carbs -but monitor it closely. Some times people find that they need to stick to a LC diet.
good luck

hope that helps.

Edited by MAYNARD76 on 12/02/2011 04:59:04 MST.

Sharon,

Thanks for those links, very interesting stuff.

Wonder if the ants protect the aphids from other predators?

This past summer for two months I tried the Paleo diet or there abouts. I eliminated milk, reduced grains drastically, cut out potatoes and beans, and stopped/ reduced drastically eating candy (I have quite the sweet tooth) Basically was eating meats, eggs, fish, vegetables and fruit. While I had gone from 194 to 187 exercising and eating as I normally would prior to this, I had plateaued for a few weeks. I started these eating changes and got down to 180lbs and I had stopped exercising at the same time as well. Clearly there is something to it.

I am now back at 187, not eating as I did (those sweets again!) or exercising frequently enough.

My one consistent exception to the paleo was a substitute for sweets, I mixed ghee(dairy exception), almond milk, honey, cardamon and cinnamon warmed in the microwave. Very nourishing and tasty, it would quench my hunger pang I would not gorge on something like lets say a pack of cookies.

Edited by WalkSoftly33 on 12/02/2011 13:39:45 MST.

My weight fluctuation on the PCT was not all due to changes in muscles, but it's probably an accurate idea that some of my problem was not eating enough protein on a daily basis.

My face tells a story of my weight fluctuation pretty well. There's not a huge difference because my weight fluctuation wasn't huge, but the 2nd picture is the thinnest I ever got (I got a little bit thinner but have no picture) and after that, I never got that thin again despite having ramped up my mileage to an average of 10 additional miles in my 2nd year of sectioning.

Here is my face over time.

Here I am on day 1.


Here I am after about 5 weeks on the trail. Notice how much thinner my cheeks are.


Here I am on day 1 of my 2nd giant section of the PCT. It's the following May after getting off the trail from my first 1/2 of the PCT. I've gained all the weight back that I lost.


Here I am in Oregon. My face is skinny again, but not as skinny as it was the previous year.


Here I am in Seattle. Note that my cheeks are filled up again and my double-chin has returned.


Me at the Canadian border. Can't have pictures of the PCT without one at the border. All I had was a disposable.


When I was first hearing about the Paleo diet I also thought it was a fad diet and that eating all that saturated fat had to be a bad thing and it's ridiculous to think we shouldn't eat fruit or grains.

Then I read around on the web, particularly Mike Eades, Kurt Harris and Andreas Eenfeldt. Both Eades and Harris use a lot of references in their online materials. They are quite science-oriented. I tried it because of Dr. Eenfeldt. His youtube presentation was friendly and accessible and he promised I would stop feeling so hungry so he's the one who convinced me to try it. The other two convinced me it wasn't a fad.

I read a few others. That Perfect Health Diet guy makes it so totally confusing and micro-managing as far as micro-nutrients. I got the "fad diet" vibes from him big-time. Some of the others out there are just too body-buildery and diet-bookery for my tastes. Even Dr. Eades seemed a bit too much like a pop diet book because of the unfortunate name of his diet book, but his posts are well-written and he explains things well and reads the original research. Harris explains it best in my opinion. Just avoid the Neolithic Agents of Disease.

So I've been avoiding the NADs and because I'm prone to overweight, I've been also reducing my carbs. It's really helping. Nobody has to force a grainless, breadless, sugar and fruitless diet on anybody. I'm not even forcing it on myself. Once I've lost enough weight, I will increase my carbs and to do that I'll eat more yams/sweet potatoes, more fruit and probably more beans and rice. I don't care what they say about beans, I really like Indian food and it's killing me not to have lentils or chickpeas every now and then.

"Your observations... the earlier ones included... Have made me stop and think about what I've learned and to remember to look at the knowledge I have with a healthy sense of caution. And to be honest, I just don't know enough about nutrition and the biochemistry behind it to properly reply to you. If I tried to I'd be solely popping off conjecture."

I think this thread has made a lot of people, myself included, reevaluate their positions. It has been one of the more interesting threads in recent memory for me. I went from knowing from zip about the Paleo diet to having a basic grasp of what it is about, which in turn led me to accept it as a valid for at least some people in both the forms that have been discussed here, ketogenic and non ketogenic, as explained by Brian just above. I still have reservations about the long term effects of a ketogenic diet, but that is a far cry from where I was when Piper started this thread.

"It would be interesting to do a study on what kind of energy source hunter-gatherer's today use for most of their activities. Fat-based or sugar-based. From all I've read it would seem to be mainly (but not completely), fat-based. It would be enlightening to learn what it really is."

I'll speculate that it would have varied with what was available, geographically and seasonally. Hunter gathers would probably not have had the option of turning their noses up at anything edible a lot of the time, given the unpredictability of nature.
They, and we, are well equipped to handle either source as substrate for energy production and, like all other mammals, have evolved to handle a certain amount of carbohydrate for glucose/glycogen production under normal circumstances, with ketone bodies as a backup system in the absence of adequate carbohydrate sources. I think the major problem we face today is that we have a metabolic system that evolved over millions of years trying to deal with a very unhealthy diet that it is not designed to handle, the result of the "progress" we have made in the last 200 or so years. Maybe it could evolve to handle this diet, given enough time, but 200 years is not nearly enough, so many of us are paying the price. My hope is that research like that being done by the Paleo advocates, along with other promising lines of research based on our increasing ability to understand the human genome at the individual level, will one day enable us to design diets tailored to each individual's genetic requirements. I would call that the ultimate diet.

""{The ideal diet for humans includes a lot of possibilities. I believe the focus on macronutrients is misguided. There are examples of cultures that were/are healthy eating high-fat diets, high-carbohydrate diets and everything in between. What they do not eat is processed grains, particularly wheat, refined sugar, industrially processed seed oils and other modern foods. I believe these are unhealthy, and this is visible in the trail of destruction they have left around the globe. Its traces can be found in the Pacific islands, where close genetic relatives of the Kitavans have become morbidly obese and unhealthy on a processed-food diet." - Stephan Guyenet"

Right on! I think this is at the heart of where we have gone wrong in the USA, amplified by the effects of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and the stresses of modern life.

"So I've been avoiding the NADs and because I'm prone to overweight, I've been also reducing my carbs. It's really helping. Nobody has to force a grainless, breadless, sugar and fruitless diet on anybody. I'm not even forcing it on myself. Once I've lost enough weight, I will increase my carbs and to do that I'll eat more yams/sweet potatoes, more fruit and probably more beans and rice. I don't care what they say about beans, I really like Indian food and it's killing me not to have lentils or chickpeas every now and then."

Thanks so much for sharing your journey, Piper. This has been a great thread. I would encourage you to post periodically as you continue. I, for one, would be greatly interested to hear what you have learned.

"Yes, Archaeology! They study the health and nutrition of past cultures. Its certainly true that there is still a lot to know but they do know a decent amount from bones and food refuge and vessels. But your forgetting that hunter gather cultures have survived into modern times and studies have been done on them. We know a decent amount about their diets and health. It is fair to question how much they are like ancient hunter gathers- but we can learn a lot about diet by comparing their diet and health to ours."

No doubt, but I still question whether archaeologists can determine average life expectancies, or distribution of life expectancies, infant mortality, etc, from the relatively few sets of human remains excavated-just not enough data. I would agree about learning about their diet, and it is a potentially profitable line of research.

"I have to disagree with this. It is a fact that wealthier people are on average much leaner and healthier than poor people in this country. I think its easily explained by the much better quality of food the wealthy eat compared to the cheap easily available junk foods everyone else is eating. Think Wholefoods market and nice pricey restaurants where the chef would not use anything less than local organic ingredients. As modern countrys get affluent they start eating our junk food."

In this country, and perhaps Europe as well, but most definitely not in India and China. India, in particular, is experiencing a near epidemic of type 2 diabetes and obesity, centered mostly in the upper and middle classes, who can afford unhealthy food in excess, including Western fast food of late. They also do not have a strong tradition of exercise. As you said, as they get more afluent, they start eating "status food", i.e. Western junk food.

I have really enjoyed your posts, BTW. They have given me much to ponder.

My own diet, BTW, includes a lot of potatoes, sweet potatoes and other root veggies. No meat, but a lot of fish. Rice, buckwheat, quinoa, oats, barley, and yes, wheat. Close enough for us to be on, if not the same page, only a page or two apart. One further reservation in addition to the long term effects of a ketogenic diet is saturated fat from animal sources. It is a reservation, not a hard and fast rejection. Too many of the older folks in my family ate a lot of food high in saturated fat and still lived to a ripe old age and were not obese. However, they worked their butts off and were active hunters and fishermen, which may have had something to do with it. I don't know for sure, and one family's results don't count for much when trying to assess something like this.

Edited for content.

Edited by ouzel on 12/02/2011 19:36:25 MST.

"I have to disagree with this. It is a fact that wealthier people are on average much leaner and healthier than poor people in this country."

You know, that is probably true. However, I live in one of the wealthiest places in the US. I played a gig in Montecito, a little burg where all the wealthiest of the wealthy in Santa Barbara live. Oprah has a place there. I was shocked at how fat all the children were. I'm sure their parents are into raw food or vegetarianism and all shop at the farmer's market. But they were overwhelmingly pasty-white, fat and really dorky. Their parent were mostly slender but with pauchy bellies.

Compare these kids to the ones I see at the Jr. High in my neighborhood. They're almost all Latino and there's a greater proportion of skinny ones than there was at this event I went to in Montecito. Their parents, however, are mostly obese and the older the kids are, the more obese they seem to be.

I'd say that the diets of both are pretty bad.

Some very interesting links that explain in great detail what the low-carb diets are all about. The first one interviewing Dr. Stephen Phinney is particularly relevant, especially for information for what Inuit ate. Could be very helpful for your question about a ketogenic diet for hiking, Piper. He wrote the book, "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living", which focuses on long-term low-carb living.

http://tinyurl.com/7c4zq49

Another video interviewing Mary Vernon, an expert in helping obese patients.

http://tinyurl.com/86cbdbj

Article written in Harper's Magazine, 1935 by Vilhjalmur Stefansson about living among the Inuit.

http://tinyurl.com/7c9e8vv

Presentation by Andreas Eenfeldt on how the low fat diet pertains to our evolutionary history, plus a very detailed explanation of how the low carb diet works. The graphics he shows on the growth of the obesity epidemic in the last 25 years in the States is shocking:

http://tinyurl.com/86xhv5d

Edited by butuki on 12/03/2011 01:27:39 MST.

Too many of the older folks in my family ate a lot of food high in saturated fat and still lived to a ripe old age and were not obese. However, they worked their butts off and were active hunters and fishermen, which may have had something to do with it. I don't know for sure, and one family's results don't count for much when trying to assess something like this.

This is the common misconception about fat... that people get fat from eating fat. The science behind the effects of fat was already understood back in the 1800's, however, and clearly shows that that is not the case. It was only during the 1960's and 1970's that both the medical and political communities of the States willfully demonized fat in order to protect the interests of the wheat and corn lobbies ("Good Calories, Bad Calories", by Gary Taubes is basically an extremely well-researched investigation and critique of the demonization of fat and the deception that Ancel Keys and the American government under McGovern used to cover up the studies done on fat. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why today fat is so maligned and carbs are so highly touted. Michael Pollan in his "The Omnivore's Dilemma", also goes into it, as do quite a few other researchers).

You cannot get fat from eating fat alone. There may be other health risks, but gaining weight is not one of them. This is because you gain weight through the amount of insulin you produce in your body. Insulin can only be utilized through either carbohydrates or, to a much lesser extent, protein. In the presence of fat alone, insulin does not act. This is why people who get fat always have high levels of insulin. It is the insulin that allows you to metabolize glucose into fat stores (and, of course, metabolize the carbohydrates into energy for the body). It is also why diabetics thrive on low-carb diets, since it is the spiking and troughing of excessive body sugar (glucose) that forces the pancreas to over-produce insulin and become exhausted. Diabetes is basically the state of an exhausted (Type 2 diabetes) or genetically non-productive (Type 1 diabetes, and rarer) pancreas.

The low-carbohyrate diet works to lower body fat because the body is no longer utilizing high amounts of insulin. Insulin is the key to understanding all of this. Many researchers and nutritionists call the low-carb diet a "low insulin" diet.

Edited by butuki on 12/02/2011 22:07:16 MST.

Low insulin diet. I will call it that from now on.

I will watch the videos later, too. I had a job between my two PCT sections where I listened to audio of whales (and the noise of industrial oil exploration). We had lots of pictures around the office of whales and seals and some interesting desktop background images of a whale hunt in the arctic and another of a guy about to eat a giant piece of blubber. Ew. Looked nasty to me. We had an inuit work with us for a little while and he said blubber was delicious and described all kinds of other things they ate which my memory has nicely erased due to grossness. I'd rather be in Scandanavia where I belong, with cheese and cream and reindeer stew.

Thanks, Miguel. That makes me feel a whole lot better. It would bother me a lot if I thought I had lost your respect, which is reciprocated, by the way. I guess I just assumed based on the proximity of your post to mine, speaking of sloppy.

Tom, it would take a lot for me to lose respect for you. We have enough history and even private correspondence between us to know where we both basically stand on things, and even if we have on occasion disagreed (rare), we've always found our ways back to mutual understanding. I sincerely hope that one day we get a chance to meet in person and hopefully do a hike together.

So I was sitting on the couch watching a football game, resting my chin on my belly, when I noticed a bit of fuzz in my navel. As I began to pick at the fuzz, I realized it wasn't just fuzz in my navel, but a fleece throw I thought I lost! Whoa!

Time to lose weight.

So I'm going to try this Paleo diet, starting, as best I can, on Monday. I'll let y'all know how it goes.

" I sincerely hope that one day we get a chance to meet in person and hopefully do a hike together."

Let's keep that option. It would be a wonderful thing to continue the journey we have begun here in person for a change.

"We have enough history and even private correspondence between us to know where we both basically stand on things, and even if we have on occasion disagreed (rare), we've always found our ways back to mutual understanding"

I could not have expressed it better. My heart is at peace.

"...with cheese and cream and reindeer stew."

I'm guessing that Mountain House does not have a freeze-dried meal with that.

--B.G.--

Doug, you're lucky no one decided to go skinny dipping in that pristine alpine lake amidst the Fuzzy Mountains.

Tom, I'd like to add something that may affect your thinking on wheat, in reference to this statement:

"I will refer you back to my previous observations about civilizations being based on grains. They have been remarkably successful for millenia, including here in America up until about 40-50 years ago."

While wheat is the most toxic of the grains those civilizations have been based on, wild wheat and long-cultivated varieties like emmer and einkorn are not at all the same as the wheat we all eat today: Norman Borlaug recieved a Nobel Prize for producing the high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that now account for nearly all the wheat consumed in the world. It increased food supply, accounting for his awards. No one really bothered to evaluate whether the mutations had changed its toxin profile compared to previously consumed wheat; wheat toxicity wasn't something that was all that relevant or well known in that context, decades ago.

If they had, they would have discovered a 5-fold increase in the toxins gluten and wheat-germ agglutinin, the proteins that induce the intestinal perforations that cause the autoimmune symptoms associated with wheat toxicity, and an increase in gliadin, which directly stimulates the appetite to a tune of about 400 calories a day desired by the body over its actual level of need. This is on top of the fact that the starches unique to wheat stimulate a greater blood-sugar spike (and subsequent insulin response) than pure glucose. The potential for negative health effects from wheat is much greater with today's varieties than those available before, in particular with regards to obesity and gut/autoimmune disorders, as well as the general inflammation-fueled degeneration that is now simply attributed to "aging."

These new wheat varieties entered the food supply about 50 years ago.

I'm not saying that those other factors you note changing around that time aren't important as well, but the wheat that we eat, and the changes it underwent in that same time period, deserve consideration as a major factor as well.

The recent book "Wheat Belly" by William Davis goes into this in a lot more detail, based on both his experience as an MD and the very solid science that is emerging on the subject. Of course, the title and subtitle are yet another example of a piece of solid reason and information being dressed up for mass-consumption, having to compete with those fad-diet books and all, but don't let that deter you from the very compelling content that lies behind the cover.

I'll also note that in a world with fewer environmental toxins, wheat toxicity may be less of an issue. With the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat surprisingly high in heavy metals, products and byproducts of petroleum extraction, refining, and burning, industrial wastes and runoffs, polymers whose effects we're only just starting to understand, fertilizers, pesticides and more, however, our bodies are saddled with the task of dealing with an unprecedented toxin load. Eliminating notable toxins that we can choose not to expose ourselves to by simply eating something else strikes me as perfectly sensible. We don't live in the same environment that we did 50 years ago, much less 100 or 1000 years ago.

"I'll also note that in a world with fewer environmental toxins, wheat toxicity may be less of an issue. With the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat surprisingly high in heavy metals, products and byproducts of petroleum extraction, refining, and burning, industrial wastes and runoffs, polymers whose effects we're only just starting to understand, fertilizers, pesticides and more, however, our bodies are saddled with the task of dealing with an unprecedented toxin load. Eliminating notable toxins that we can choose not to expose ourselves to by simply eating something else strikes me as perfectly sensible. We don't live in the same environment that we did 50 years ago, much less 100 or 1000 years ago."

This is the part of your post that affected my thinking the most, Erik, so I'll start there. Beautifully put and powerful. I couldn't agree more, but I would not necessarily agree that it justifies a blanket elimination of wheat from the national diet. The first thing I did after I read your post was go off and do other things while I thought about it. When I got back, I got on Pubmed and did a few searches, which turned up many hits concerning wheat toxicity and gliadin. They all center around Coeliac Disease which, according to Wiki, occurs in anywhere from 1:1750 and 1:150 people. Obviously there is a lot of uncertainty, but even the low end estimate limits the disease to a small portion of the population. Maybe better to focus on diagnosing those with gluten sensitivity, who comprise 6% of the population and include the smaller number prone to Coeliac Disease, according to Wiki, and eliminate wheat from their diet? I couldn't find anything relating to gliadin and increased appetite, but did find a reference to high glycemic index and white flour, white rice, etc. Whole grains, however, were listed as having a GI in the mid 50's range. All in all, it is an issue that I will now be watching much more closely, thanks to your post, but I remain to be convinced that complete elimination of wheat from the national diet is justified at this point. The part of your post I referenced above, however, has been integrated into my thought processes for application on a much wider scale, for which I thank you.

Dianne,

Thanks for posting about this.

I started Keto this week, and I've already been thinking about how I'm going to tackle hiking—specifically long days or multiple day hikes. Right now I'm on the back end of the "Keto Flu" (sluggishness, mild headaches), but things are looking up.

When you first started keto, were you doing much hiking? Any tips for doing longer days? Were you bonking at all when first starting? Carb-up on big hike days? Right know I think I'm just going to have to take it easy until the initial symptoms mellow out.

And just curious, what kind of foods are you eating while on the trail? Mostly nuts, seeds, cheese, dehydrated/stable meats, avocados? Have you experimented with ghee?

Thanks!

Chris

So to start off with, I want to say that everything I know about Paleo I learned in this thread. That being said, I've spent the last 21 days doing the "21 Day Kickstart" to vegan eating. Now this isn't going to be a comparison, but you guys have talked about all kinds of studies and nutritional stuff, and my question is this: Vegan is supposedly so much more heart healthy in part because you drastically reduce your intake (and increase your release of) blood cholesterol. So have there been any studies that show how/if the Paleo diet affects things like cholesterol, triglycerides, and other indicators of heart disease?

Heather, take a look at the articles and forum discussions in Mark's Daily Apple. It is replete with the information you are seeking. Mark Sisson, who started and heads the website, has really done his homework on the nutritional background of all the diet information he recommends. Also, take a look at PaleoDiet.com. It is a website that has been going steadily since 1997, long before most people were talking about the paleo diet. There is a lot of research linked to there.

Yes, I bonked big time. Especially at week 4 where I actually thought I was going to die. I was simply deficient in potassium from the water loss at the beginning of switching to fat-burning mode. A few supplements and I felt better.

As for foods when I go hiking:

If I day hike, I have no need for food. I eat breakfast and then don't need to eat the rest of the day either during or right after the hike. I have noticed that on hiking days, if I eat something along the lines of canned salmon and sweet potatoes (lower fat, higher carb) I can hike faster than if I go for something like bacon and eggs. So now on easy hiking days I keep the carbs low and just accept that I'll be a little slower than usual but on big adventure hikes I'll up the carbs a bit for breakfast so I can go faster.

On backpacking trips I have had success with beef jerky and coconut oil "candy" I made with dark chocolate melted with coconut manna and coconut oil with a little bit of nuts. Kind of melty and messy though. I've used some creamed coconut stuff to make a curry. It's like a brick of semi-dehydrated coconut milk. I need to experiment more to make it tastier. I ate it with rice noodles and used regular curry powder, but something more Thai-spiced would be better. I bring hard cheese and salami/sausage/pepperoni and that actually makes a pretty good breakfast.

I don't need to eat quite as much food when backpacking when I eat this way. Of course, that could be because I still have weight to lose and thus can "eat" my reserves.

Thanks Miguel. I'll check it out. :)

Awesome! Thanks for the tips.

The Paleo diet makes perfect sense to me, it is what we are genetically wired to. I have read a lot about this since the first post.

I don't need to lose weight, and all my vitals are low (cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.). The time to look into this kind of diet is not after you have a problem, but to prevent any of these problems from occurring in the first place.

Piper S, took me a while, but I finally started making pemmican. Wonderful food, great flavor, when I made it I had prepared myself for a flavor like a meat candle, ie, tallow with dried meat, but it came out more like meat candy. The trick is simple: grass fed beef, ideally, fat rendered keeping it under 250 degrees the whole time, easy with thick bottomed pan and thermoter, as much fat cut from the leanest cuts of beef, dried until crackable, thin strips, then grind in blender to form what looks sort of like beef primaloft, then mix, form into patties or sheets in plastic bags. You can actually see more or less good grass fed beef, the fat on it is white, very white, and renders clear/yellowish, with an excellent flavor. I can think of no better trail food, the cost is about 8-10 a pound if you find reasonably priced grass fed beef, they will usually give you the fat for free, 3 pounds meat makes about 1 pound dried, and fat renders to around half the weight of the starting fat. There's a reason that early American explorers and Indians valued pemmican so highly, it was the best trail food in existence, and probably still is, hard to imagine anything better, dense, calorie rich, great protein, and it tastes great.

I also tried coconut oil based on your comments, virgin, and have to admit, my expectations of good smooth tasting oil was shattered by a sort of gross waxy texture that in fact resembles a coconut candle to my palate, and which almost made me throw up although I did get down a spoonful. Given it cost $6 a pound think I'll stick to either olive oil or rendered fat (have to get cholesterol checked of course to make sure that's ok).

To me, re the ongoing discussion of paleo or whatever else, that's just so complicated, and I wouldn't look for real answers here, just questions that are worth following up if you are interested in such things. One thing is certain,the Inuit did not get diabetes until they started eating our starchy carbs, and their weight was what it needed to be for their climate. I come from farm stock in Norway, and a big chunk of my family has diabetes, so I don't really think there was much adaptation to high carb diets. It's worth noting that potatoes are the worst offenders, and Norwegians love their potatoes, a relatively recent import from South America historically speaking. To me, diabetes is the real answer to what constitutes a healthy diet, if it appears in big numbers in any study group that eats carbs, and not in a low carb group, then you have your answer. Wish the early invaders of South America had been a bit more interested in the cultures and food and health over grabbing the gold and leaving, that's a place you could have seen if there was real adaptation to those fairly starchy diets over time, or if they had the same issues we do. I do know that the South Eastern US tribes that grew corn showed much higher rates of dental decay than tribes who depended more on hunting / gathering, ie, lower carb, and almost no starches.

I was also impressed by Stefansson's writings and views on diet, very interesting stuff. But the range of diets if you just keep it to the Americas and their original native populations is pretty wide, and it's also important to remember that the Inuit eat the contents of the stomachs of the animals they eat, and the livers and all that, in a fresh states, and that's almost impossible to emulate in any non rural setting any longer, even with access to living non agribusiness infected livestock, so as a model it's essentially impossible to duplicate in any town/city setting. Other than the far northern groups, everyone else ate varied diets, that's what 'hunter gatherer' means. But I tend to agree with the logic, there's a huge difference between eating fresh complex foods and heavily modified starches grown with man made chemicals and oil/gas products/byproducts in soil that is really not much more than a glorified hydroponic grow medium. I specifically avoid the term 'genetically modified' because all human developed/optimized grain ever grown is genetically modified (ever seen the first corn 'ears'? tiny things, hard to imagine anyone even seeing something worth maximizing by patient crop selection).

There's more than a little irony in people going out to be in 'nature' then filling their bodies with total industrial generated garbage like sugar powders and 'power bars',, to me that makes zero sense, in any way, I want to be in nature, not outside of it, and that starts with what I eat and drink, ie, what's in my body. Can't be perfect, but nobody needs to be perfect, just a decent try is all that's needed.

Edited by hhope on 01/24/2012 13:59:17 MST.

Tell me more about this potassium deficiency.

I'm at week 2, and just snowshoed uphill for 3 miles. I felt just peachy hiking, but when we stopped I got seriously dehydrated (unusually so), leg cramps (maybe the dehydration, but I've also been reading about potassium or magnesium deficiencies associated with keto?), and a low blood sugar dizziness. A snickers bar helped the last one (and didn't knock me out of ketosis apparently).

So an oral potassium supplement? Something else? Did you have similar symptoms?

I'd hate to have to take it this easy for another 4 weeks.

Edited by ChrisMorgan on 01/28/2012 23:05:10 MST.

For my potassium problems I have been bringing NUUN tablets on hikes, but on regular days I have a bottle of potassium tablets. Potassium + salt + magnesium seems to help me with cramps.

I found this good article on Robb Wolf's website today that has been up for a while. http://www.robbwolf.com/2012/02/05/paleo-fueled-adventure/

This chunk here seems pretty relevant.

>>>
there’s a serious technical problem with carbohydrates as calorie packets. Contrary to their reputation as concentrated fuel, carbs pack a little less than half the calories of an equal quantity of fat. That can be thought of from two perspectives: 1) Using carbs as a primary fuel source requires carrying twice as much food. 2) Using carbs as a primary fuel source cuts trip duration in half.

...

There is no “carbohydrate as the primary fuel” strategy that allows absolute engagement with nature for more than a few days. An optimal exploraging strategy must maximize caloric density of carried food (by favoring fat over carbohydrates), and maximize calories foraged from the surroundings. Unless humans evolve to convert grass and wood to energy, this will primarily mean hunting and fishing, and limited sources of plant foods. The mix between carried calories and harvested calories is a balance between availability, legal restrictions, and responsible levels of impact. This balance will of course vary significantly by jurisdiction and ecosystem.
<<<

Cool, thanks.

Turns out that incident was also fueled by a cold coming on that I didn't know about at the time, but there was also dehydration: I was drinking my normal amount of water for winter hikes, but it turns out I needed much more. I find myself drinking much more water now anyway.

Now that I'm about 3.5 weeks in, and having taken some longer hikes, things have been evening out. But I'll certainly try some potassium/magnesium supplements—or maybe up my almond intake—1 cup of raw almonds has a days worth of magnesium and 40% daily value of potassium. Pretty sweet!

Now I just have to make some Ghee for my hikes...

Piper S., very interesting thread you started! There is so much reading so I have not read through all posts, just a few chosen posts here and there. I live in Sweden and here is quite much discussions in different forums on internet as well as on TV and radio programs about LCHF, Low Carb High Fat. It is becoming increasingly popular, and its easy to understand why. It simply works. You eat very good, natural food and without calorie restrictions. I am living a lowcarb lifestyle since about three years. I call it a lifestyle, not a diet, because I think a diet is something which is supposed to be a limited period of time, but I have no plans to change this healthy way of living :-)
My primary reason for this lifestyle is not because I am sick in any way, but because I want to stay healthy. I feel more healthy and stronger now, than I did back when I was 30 years old. I am 42 years now.

Your initial question was about staying warm when sleeping and how lowcarb can affect that? I think it affects one's warmth in several positive ways. First, after have been eating lowcarb high fat without calorie restrictions for a longer time (weeks, months) the body no longer feels the need to preserve the resources so hard (which happens with a diet with calorie restrictions, starving). This means the metabolism is working normally and thus your body is producing heat normally. Second, when living on lowcarb for a longer time your blood circulation improves gradually, hands and feets are no longer freezing so easily. I think the reason is effects of that the blood sugar and insuline levels are constantly at a stable, normal level, which leads to a lot of good improvements in the body.

Well, this was some of my personal experiences and opinions. I don't know if this was any contribution to the discussion, because so much has already been written, but I hope so.

Timo

Piper, you mentioned something about a creamed coconut brick, like dehydrated coconut milk. What's that? Is it something you are making, or a specific product you are buying? I'd like to use coconut cream/milk powder, but they all have a little milk casein in them to help with texture. If there's another option I'd like to know about it.

Timo, I got started on this diet when I saw the video on http://www.dietdoctor.com/lchf. When he said it would calm my hunger I had to try it. More than a year after hiking the PCT I still couldn't get my hunger under control and I couldn't exercise without my hunger going haywire so I was gaining lots of weight. The Swedish diet doctor was right. It cured my insatiable hunger on the very first day. It was so incredible an experience I walked around in a daze wondering how to occupy my mind which was no longer filled with a struggle against eating and hunger.

As for the coconut cream brick, it's a product called Creamed Coconut. This is it:
Let's Do Organic Creamed Coconut
I got it at my local health food store. I still have not figured out how to make a decent backpacking meal out of it yet. This weekend's attempt was pretty bad, good flavor, but disappointing meal. Basically a soupy fat bomb was what I ended up with. Slept pretty darn warm afterwards, though.

New research showing that glycogen stores (carbohydrates) in your brain are used after periods of exercise when blood sugar is depleted:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/how-exercise-fuels-the-brain/

This is just one of thousands of things we don't know about how the human body functions. There is a large body of research that says an Atkins or Ketogenic diet is a bad idea, and the above article is just one example of how carbohydrates play a critical role in human health, and can in many ways that we don't think about or understand.

The third post of this thread talks about Eskimos and how they too were able to live on this diet. What Roleigh fails to mention is that the inuit have a decade's shorter life expectancy and have a higher rate of cancer than the average Canadian. (source)

I'd suggest that people find self control over weight in a more holistic way than this—this is simply a bad idea and extremely dangerous advice to be giving over the internet.

Edited by kylemeyer on 02/22/2012 07:22:42 MST.

Kyle, all the more recent research... the tons of it I've been reading for the past two years... is showing the opposite of what you are warning about. There are lots of people now who've been doing the paleo way of eating (which, by the way, doesn't eschew carbohydrates, but lowers how much you're eating... this is NOT the Atkins diet!) for a goodly amount of time... long enough for negative effects to show up... and very few people report any problems. In fact, most report phenomenal improvements in well-being and health check ups.

The growing body of evidence is showing that the advice to eat so many carbohydrates and lower fat intake is actually the dangerous advice, and a growing number of doctors are actually calling the government and medical community's recommendation to eat more carbs and less fat irresponsible, some even say criminal. As a diabetic whose LIFE depends on controlling my blood sugars and weight, this is the ONLY way of living and eating that has finally brought all the crazy blood sugars under control. It just makes sense.

As to your comment about the Inuit... not true. Until western diets entered the diets of almost all North American natives, from the Inuit to the Terra del Fuegans, cancer was almost non-existent. Early doctors who traveled ahead of the oncoming Europeans reported astonishment at the lack of diseases that were common in western diets, like heart disease, strokes, and cancer. They'd report maybe one patient a year, and that patient always tended to have unusual circumstances, usually pertaining to having started eating more European food.

The whole paleo and primal community is extremely conscious about the science behind what they eat; understanding nutrition and the way the nutrients work and being honest about all of it is the basis of the movement. Head over to Mark's Daily Apple's forum and take a look at all the discussions, filled with skepticism and experimentation. Even one of the leaders of the movement constantly asks members, many of whom are doctors and scientists, to evaluate and critique his ideas. It's a very healthy learning environment.

All that being said, I am still constantly learning about nutrition. One thing I've worried a lot about is getting the proper balanced diet, since I am not a dietician I worry about getting too much of one thing, and not enough of another. But that's what the paleo movement tries very, very hard to address... more than any other nutritional routine I've ever seen or learned about. Paleo isn't against carbs or a "low carb" diet per se; it has looked at different nutritional input and through the experiments and results, determined what seems to be causing the troubles. What they have found is the it is modern refined carbs that are causing most of the obesity epidemic and that fats do not cause the problems that so many untried people are claiming do.

Edited by butuki on 02/22/2012 08:04:16 MST.

Of note, you just provided zero sources while attempting to argue that a ketogenic diet is healthy. Simply looking back through this thread, I don't see "low" carbohydrate diets being discussed as much as putting your body into ketosis which is extremely controversial. Reducing caloric intake and increasing healthy foods reduces carbohydrate intake by definition without ever changing metabolic processes in your body.

The Inuit had thousands of years to adapt to a ketogenic diet or die. Likewise, the Tarahumara have been running barefoot for thousands of years. Neither of these are justifications to eat nothing but Moose liver or start running down the streets with FiveFingers. In both cases, you'll find new stresses on weak systems in your body to which you may not be well adapted. Except that with running barefoot, you're not playing with the health of your organs.

I have no beef with the paleo diet by definition—everyone should eat more raw foods. But that's not what I and others should be concerned with in this thread.

Regarding the efficacy of a "Ketogenic" Diet: I would agree that there is less science out there supporting that the body's production of ketones precipitates weight loss. However, what is clear is that eating a low carb, high fat (LCHF) diet leaves the body feeling sated with less calories. There is also stronger science that suggests carbohydrate restriction moderates insulin levels, and insulin secretion signals the storage of fat. It's very possible results do in fact come from caloric restriction—but I'd rather eat 1600 calories feeling full than 1600 wanting to eat more.

As an interesting side note, a recent survey of Swedes shows that approximately 25% of them have adopted some form of LCHF diet (http://www.kostdoktorn.se/wp-content/2011/03/demoskop_mars_2011.pdf).


Regarding safety: I have heaps of broccoli—and other fibrous vegetables—with my meat. The restriction of carbohydrates is eliminating those non-fibrous carbs found in grains, processed sugars, and the like.

A 2010 Johns Hopkins study found no long-lasting side effects from the diet (including kidney, liver function and cholesterol), when used for the treatment of Pediatric Epillepsy: (http://www.hopkinschildrens.org/high-fat-ketogenic-diet-to-control-seizures-is-safe-over-long-term.aspx). There are numerous other studies studying adult populations out there, saying similar things.

Edited by ChrisMorgan on 02/23/2012 22:29:50 MST.

Kyle, I provided plenty of links earlier in the thread. I don't see why I should go out of my way for you right now. Go do your homework a little more extensively and open-mindedly before coming here and criticizing everyone for something you seem to have made up your mind about with just two links. It is not my responsibility to educate you if you're not going to make an effort to read more than you have.

Edit: me being too hotheaded.

Edited by ChrisMorgan on 02/23/2012 22:28:37 MST.

Here's a great resource for anybody interested in high-fat diets:

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com

Peter knows his stuff, though his writing is definitely of a technical bent.

His most recent post highlights one potentially negative impact of excess PUFA in ketogenic diets, though the applicability to humans is up for debate.

That's a great link, Jonathan, thanks.

Yes, I am reading his blog almost everyday! But the Swedish version, www.kostdoktorn.se.
I'll insert the link to the video here, in case someone missed it (it's worth seeing, well spent time I would say):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSeSTq-N4U4&feature=player_embedded

About what to eat on the trail, I have found a thorough guide about making Pemmican, written by Lex Rooker. This is definitely something I will give a try, seems to me it should be the best food possible for the trail, for someone used to lchf food: low weight (think how little amount you need per day of this concentrated food), can be stored in room temperature without refrigerator a long time, contains all nutrients the body needs. As for the taste and consistency, that's to be found out :-)
http://www.traditionaltx.us/images/PEMMICAN.pdf

I wish I could make that pemmican but I seriously doubt I could grind the dried meat up well enough. That's the step that has me stuck. I purchased pemmican from US Wellness Meats and I think it tastes delicious. It's not the real thing, though. It is supposed to stay refrigerated but can last a few days in your pack okay.

Here is a good source to read about the benefits of low carb diets. It's written by some researchers and contains tons of citations from all kinds of research.
The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living

Additionally, I recommend reading as much of Protein Power as you can. The blog is jam-packed with references to research.

(For some reason my art and science link didn't work.)

Edited by sbhikes on 02/22/2012 15:07:56 MST.

US Wellness says they're working with their processor to produce a shelf-stable version. See the comments here:

http://blog.grasslandbeef.com/bid/40499/Pemmican

I sent them an email asking for an update. I'll post here if/when I get a reply.

When I want to powder things, I reach for liquid nitrogen.

I think dry ice might be the closest thing most people can get.

Dry, freeze, grind. Repeat as desired.

Piper S., don't overthink the process, making pemmican is VERY easy.

To dry the meat, cut into very thin strips, of very lean meat. I cut out all the fat I can manage from the meat to try to get only lean in the dried meat. This is important, otherwise you lose some advantages of real pemmican.

Then take those strips and stick in a basic dehydrator, ideally with a fan, I just added a computer case fan to my basic dehydrating thing, which makes it dry at around 120 degrees, give or take. Ideally keep it below that, otherwise the meat actually cooks, which I discovered on my first rounds of drying meat. You do not want cooked meat, you want it dried.

Drying takes my unit about 36 to 48 hours, and the test to see if it's done is also very simple, if the thin slice cracks, not bends, when you bend it, it's done. It's very easy to feel the difference, and if you leave the meat on for 6 hours more after you think it's done, it will definitely be done.

Rendering fat is also very easy, but you must use a thermometer, to keep the fat under about 240 degrees, more than that and it doesn't taste as good and may lose nutrient values. That's what I read, and that's what I found on my first batch, which overheated a bit, over 250, still fine, but you can taste the difference.

If you want to open the black box, or however you put it, then making your own real food using real grass fed beef ingredients is the way to go.

This stuff is good, really good. Cost for the finished product, remembering that you get about 1/3 weight of fat starting when rendering, but that fat you get for free from the butcher, is about 6 a pound, give or take. Meat comes to about 1/3 or less dried, so the cost per pound is the cost per half pound of dried meat, ie, about 1.5 pounds fresh, give or take.

Do not salt or otherwise treat the meat, that totally defeats the purpose.

There is NO WAY anyone can sell real pemmican legally, it's impossible, the meat is raw. So anything called pemmican is almost certain to be oversalted or some other thing they do to deal with the rawness of the meat. So don't bother looking for it, just learn to make it, I like the process, I usually pick up 5 or 6 pounds of fat, you want the thick chunks, not the gristly pieces, they are easier to cube into 1/2 inch or so cubes for rendering. Also don't worry about rendering the fat to get every gram out, it's not worth it, you gain almost nothing and may end up overheating it, just take it off when the temp starts approaching 240 and you can't readily lower it by lowering the burner temp.

I read most of the online stuff about making real pemmican, it's really not hard, and any how to that makes you think it is isn't accurate.

I store the rendered fat in big jars in the fridge, and thaw it out when I get the meat readied. When it's still liquid, it's really really good. Not slightly good, super good. I suspect non grass fed beef fat rendered is not going to be really good at all, it's quite different from what I gather, different color, and I'm sure different flavor. But when it's good, you want to dip bread into it and just eat it that way, at least that's what I do. But really hard to clean up, you need super hot water and good grease cutting soap.

I'll document it with pics etc and maybe a blog posting when I make my next batch, but this stuff really does last a long time.

To really kick production into gear, get a big pot, thick aluminum bottom for even heating really helps, big size, so you can do 8 to 10 pounds at a time. And you can make your own drying boxes too, it's easy, cardboard, some plastic pipes, a lightbulb etc, a fan if you want, but the regular dehydrators work fine if you use a small fan on them to keep the temps down. Just slower since they don't have a huge capacity.

Grinding up the dried meat is also easy, it just grinds, turns into fluffy stuff, pick out the hard pieces, grind them again, once done, mix the remelted rendered fat in 50/50 by weight and pop into bags or storage, you can use a muffin pan if you want the pemmican in nicely sized chunks, otherwise just put in a zip lock freezer bag let cool then seal. If you did it right it will store at room temp no problem.

I have no interest in eating junk food on the trail, it's just not a thing I think forwards anything positive, and making your own high quality energy food using recipes that were worked out over thousands of years by people who were always on the move strikes me as one of the better ways to actually get with natural systems. You are what you eat, and I don't want to be a sugar powder or junk energy bar, it's not appealing.

Edited by hhope on 02/22/2012 16:04:34 MST.

I just read this thread from the start and it has a bunch of great info. I look forward to following the progress made by folks that have made the conversion to the Paleo diet.

Piper,
You weight change on the PCT was interesting to read. I have been trying to figure out what happened on my thru and there may be some similiar factors between us.

I started the PCT at my ideal weight of 187. I was in the best shape of my life with decent upper body muscle mass, more than a runner but less than a weight lifter. By Tahoe I had lost 12 lbs down to 175 but then only lost 1 additional lb. the rest of the way to Canada. Here is what I believe happened.
1) Since I was 12 lbs lighter the second half I was burning about 7% less calories due to the reduced weight assuming that everything else was equal.
2) I believe that hikers get more efficient as their hike goes on. I suspect that feet are lifted a bit less, I know I tripped much more the second half of the trip. Also, you have probably noticed that thru hikers have a different look, almost like they are gliding down the trail. I think the increased efficiency is what we notice.
3) I bumped up my calories. The first half I was eating somewhere in the range of 5-6000/day. The second half I ate 6000+, sometimes as much as 8000 calories/day. I apparently was able to eat as much as I burned which is remarkable given my daily mileage average of about 32 miles per day for Tahoe on.

I also lost a good bit of upper body muscle mass which was not not surprising. I suspect that you may have had a net gain in muscle mass along the way. I also rapidly gained 20lbs. after the hike in spite of knowing full that there was a great possible of weight gain when I was though hiking. It happened so quickly that it caught me by surprise. It was obvisious that may calorie consumption was greater than my burn since I couldn't do a lot of exercise given the pain in my feet.

Now that I have been back to high intensity training for the R2R2R trip the weight has stablized and my upper body muscle mass has increased.

One comment about low carb hiking. There are different degrees of hiking intensity. Since a marathon runner can get 18-20 miles prior to bonking, I would expect that at a slower pace a hiker could get up to 20 miles per day at modest elevation gain eating few if any carbs. As the intensity, elevation gain or duration continues higher then the importance of carbs would increase.

I got a reply from one of the founders of US Wellness:

"We are in process of changing pemmican fabricators. When this is resolved we should have a shelf stable model in April.

"Packaging will change a bit with the pemmican being round versus rectangle. This should create a 4 fold increase in daily production and eliminate the out of stock issues we have been experiencing."

Chris, concerning potassium, I believe vegetable juice is a good source of potassium. My label info read 28% daily rec per serving, I believe.

Here's another good link to explain the safety and naturalness of ketosis. Take note of this:
"If you’re starving, glucose comes mainly from one place, and that is from the body’s protein reservoir: muscle.
...
But the breakdown of muscle creates another problem, namely, that (in Paleolithic times and before) survival was dependent upon our being able to hunt down other animals and/or forage for plant foods. It makes it tough to do this if a lot of muscle is being converted into glucose and your muscle mass is dwindling."

Before when my body was unable to convert its own fat reserves into energy, that was my way of life. Either constantly eat to keep the glucose running or consume my muscle mass, get lethargic and stop using energy. Telling people they should base their whole diet on grains and starches is the more dangerous advice. There is absolutely nothing dangerous about ketosis. It's totally natural and all of us go into it from time-to-time whether we know it or not. Without this ability we die.

I started my diet at around 160lbs. I'm now at 133. I've lost 3 belt holes so far. I eat with gusto at every meal. Breakfasts like steak and eggs, or liver and onions or just a cup of coffee with butter and coconut oil. Lunch is usually nothing or canned salmon or sardines or bone broth. Dinner is usually vegetables meat and sometimes a root or tuber. Dessert is super dark chocolate. And wine.

Better than the weight loss, I feel better. I don't have so many aches and pains. My mental health is better than it was before. I feel happy all the time. I feel alert. I have energy and strength.

Even the feeling of being slower when I hike is gone. I was last to the summit for months while I was adjusting, but now I'm first and once I get out ahead of the others far enough, I even run.

I still can eat breakfast before a hike and nothing during the hike and not feel weak, tired or hungry. The energy levels I have are constant and sustained at all times. I've even started taking a fitness class where we do silly things like burpees and mountain-climbers and squats and I can go to this class at noon after not having had anything to eat since dinner the night before and I have just as much strength and energy as on the days I have breakfast. It's wonderful. This is how life should be. Not on a steady drip of gu and clif bars. That's a silly way to live.

On my last backpack trip I brought 4 pemmican bars (tallow and beef), a small bag of macadamias and brazil nuts, coconut curry for dinner (planned to supplement with foraged greens but didn't find any) and a couple squares of dark chocolate for dessert and morning coffee. I didn't weigh this but it wasn't a whole lot. It was energy dense and I never felt hungry. I came home with one uneaten pemmican bar and half the nuts, too. We hiked about 8 miles the first day and 12 the second with some trail maintenance along the way. This is definitely the better way to go.

I just ordered a beef heart, to be picked up on Friday. Should I make jerky with it? Cook it in the slow cooker? I also ordered beef cheeks and liver (I love liver.) All grass-fed. There are so many more interesting foods when you stop eating grains. For starch I've discovered all kinds of delicious things like rutabagas and celery root. For my birthday I had lamb, green beans and chanterelles, less than one potato, mussels with bacon, 2 glasses of pino noir and one big huge chestnut chocolate mousse with apricot sauce. I lost 3 lbs.

My friend says sear the heart like steak and serve with browned butter sauce.

"There is absolutely nothing dangerous about ketosis. "

That would be great....if it were true.

Speak with a doctor lately?

That would be great....if it were true.

Speak with a doctor lately?

David, I know you mean well, but why do you do this without doing the research? First, there are now a lot of respected doctors who very much support the ketosis route. Of note is Dr. Richard Bernstein, Dr. Loren Cordain, Dr. Stephen D. Phinney, Dr. Doug McGuff, Dr. Mary Vernon, Dr. Robert H. Lustig, and Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt (who has transformed big time the obesity epidemic in Sweden... in the last seven years a 24% reduction in obesity throughout Sweden).

Second, there is a very big difference between a ketogenic diet and a diet causing ketoacidosis. Ketogenesis is one of the body's two natural metabolic responses to procuring energy from food. All mammals use them both. The ketogenic response developed in a world where famine was a very common, completely normal recurring fact of life and helped organisms sustain themselves over long periods without a lot of food (which happened more often than not). More and more evidence is beginning to reveal that the body is meant to be in a ketogenic state most of the time, and only use the glycogenic metabolism when more energy is needed, or when the rare event of high carb availability made it possible to stock up on fat stores (for which the glycogenic metabolism is great... that's why bears get so fat in the fall, when they gorge on berries... they go into a ketogenic state for months after that, and survive upon their fat stores).

Ketoacidosis is a state that usually only happens to Type 1 diabetics. It occurs when the body cannot produce enough insulin to battle the overproduction of ketones. Normal, healthy people do not usually have to worry about this, because their insulin production is working fine. Here is an article that explains the difference between ketosis and ketoacidosis.

Miquel, there are just as many articles suggesting the state of ketosis is very bad so I suspect that going back and forth won't do anyone any good here. But I was serious about the Doctor comment. I want to know if she has been monitored by a doctor with this diet.

With respect to what Piper did, by lowering caloric intake she lost weight. This could have been done with carbs, fats, or proteins. It really doesn't matter.

For your amusement, "bread is back on the menu!"

The Viking diet is recommended by leading obesity expert Professor Arne Astrup. He is head of the department of human nutrition at Copenhagen University, and last year launched a £12.2 million project to develop a 'new' Nordic diet.

I've done a fair bit of reading on Paleo / Primal etc as well as done various activities from ultra trail races to X-fit. Below are my observations as I don't want to spend so much time on it that I don't enjoy it.

- If I eat high fat , low carb I loose weight and I feel better. My energy is better, I feel less need to eat etc. How does it translate on the trail, well pretty darn good. I carry less food than my friends (and I only eat half of it usually). I seem to have more constant energy and generally feel better. How does it translate to moderate work loads ? Great, I do more pushups, more of just about anything, however where it does not benefit is fast and hard anerobic type of workouts, those I don't perform as well, but perhaps it's a need to train my body.
- If I were going on a long backpacking trip, I would train myself for low carb and carry a lot of fat. I've done it so many times now, that I can translate pretty seamlessly.
- If I'm doing an ultra style event, I carry some sugars, but probably only about 30% others do and still eat a lot of fat / protein stuff. Sure I don't push the uphill the same way, but I run the down a lot faster.
- If I was going for time, in a high intensity event, pushing myself for the whole time give me sugar. However, this is my goal this spring, is to try and train myself past that, just as your body adapts to eating low carb. Perhaps it ends up being a no go, perhaps not. I'll know more in a few weeks

With respect to what Piper did, by lowering caloric intake she lost weight. This could have been done with carbs, fats, or proteins. It really doesn't matter.

Actually it does, Dave. I've been monitored by my endocrinologist (diabetic doctor) for the past year now to determine what the problem is for me concerning insulin (I'm a LADA diabetic...started as a Type 2 and morphed into a Type 1). I watch every calorie I eat and the corresponding grams of fat, protein, and carbs. The amount of calories I eat doesn't change, but I've been experimenting with what happens when I raise or lower my carb intake, and adjust my fats and proteins accordingly to keep the caloric intake the same. What I've found is that when I take in more than about 70 grams of carbs a day (this is me, personally. Other people have different needs, so please don't use this number as gospel), my weight inevitably goes up, as well as my blood sugars. Lower the carbs and my weight goes down, as well as my blood sugars. I've been able to more or less control my blood sugars according to how many carbs I eat and have correspondingly also controlled my weight that way. Because I am a Type 1 diabetic and thus require injected insulin, controlling my weight had always been a very difficult thing, because the high amounts of insulin were making my weight go up. I experienced many hypoglycemic attacks because of the high amounts of insulin. Lowering carbs, though, has more than halved the amount of insulin I take everyday, which simultaneously almost eliminated my hypoglycemic attacks, and also got me losing weight back down to the weight I was in my early thirties.

The needs of a non-diabetic concerning carbs and natural production of insulin are no different from that of a diabetic. The only difference is that a diabetic cannot produce their own insulin or their insulin cannot be accessed. When a full-blown diabetic initially becomes diabetic one of the classic symptoms is emaciation. No matter how much they eat they cannot gain weight and they are constantly ravenous. This is because the insulin is not being used or is absent in the body. Without insulin you cannot gain weight. Without carbs, insulin is impotent. Before the invention of artificial insulin, diabetics were kept alive by severely restricting their carb intake. They managed to do quite well on a diet of mostly fats, medium protein, and very low carbs. Carbs are still necessary for health, though, so some carbs had to be eaten, and with no insulin, many diabetics died fairly young.

The ketogenic diet simulates a natural environment in which insulin is not needed in great amounts or over-produced by the body. Modern diets, however, bombard the body with huge amounts of carbs that stimulates far too great production of insulin, and with all that insulin being produced, first those eating the high amounts of carbs get fat, and when the carb intake goes on too long, the insulin production is exhausted (it was never meant to be produced in such high amounts)... that's when people become diabetic. Diabetes has become epidemic because of a combination of too many carbs and overproduction of insulin and a lack of exercise. People don't eat significantly more food today than they did thirty years ago... but the TYPE of food they eat has changed dramatically. It's this change in type of food... huge increases in carb intake... that has caused the obesity epidemic.

I can eat a whole stick of butter... pure fat... and not gain any weight or get a spike in my blood sugars. The amount of calories in 100 grams of fat is significantly higher than that of 100 grams of carbs. I eat one slice of white bread, though, and my blood sugar sky rockets, plus over a short period I quickly start gaining weight.

Edited by butuki on 02/29/2012 11:22:01 MST.

It's clear that the knee-jerk naysayers are not actually reading any of the research. Nor do they have any first-hand experience. It was my initial response to think eating this way is bad, too, but I have changed my mind based on reading the information and first-hand experience. Here's another really good article to read.

I'm also amazed that since this is a backpacking LIGHT website, people would be so absolutely closed-minded about a means to lighten your pack (and your "spine out" weight).

Guess I hit a nerve.

But again - lowering your caloric intake has provided you with the results. Are you able to prove me wrong?

Here is the question for everyone... does a Ketogenic diet make the body more efficient for the long term? Is it healthier for you in the long term?

Miguel would say yes, and I agree with him.

The other thing is; our brains think "weight loss" when we see the word "diet." To Miguel, diet means healthy lifestyle and a more efficient metabolism. I also agree with him.

"Is it healthier for you in the long term?"

Can you please post or re-post the studies validating this?

Not trying to start an argument but really would like to know. The basic premise of the diet is similar to Atkins and the latter had issues.

Edited by FamilyGuy on 02/29/2012 14:22:20 MST.

David,

Miguel has already posted a lot. But has anyone done a study for a lifetime of data? No, the theories have not gained wide-spread public attention until the last few years. And of course, there are dissenting studies/opinions. So one has to make their own decision and suffer or enjoy the consequences.

I have been eating Paleo food almost exclusively for the past couple of months. I have lost a few pounds, but my weight has stabilized. I feel great. However, I was not overweight or ill in the first place, as I have always gotten a lot of exercise. I figure I might be able to continue to hike until I am 120 or so. I no longer have a craving for sweets or chips either. I have a jar of M&Ms on my desk I have not touched since I started this and have no desire to eat them. I haven't even eaten ice cream... although I probably will at the end my next big hike -- as a celebration of sorts :)

Hi BPLers,
Have any of you read "Primal Body, Primal Mind, Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life" by Nora T. Gedgaudas. She explains how the Paleo diet works with more documentation and research results than most of the others I have read on the subject so far, including Mark Sissons, Loren Cordain and Robb Wolf. Maybe it's just the same info but presented more completly?
Is there a list of Paleo foods that you can recomend that lend well to lightweight backpacking? I haven't read all of this thread yet so I'll apologize if I've repeated others comments, questions or thoughts.
Best Regards,
Mulestomper

Carl,

Several of us have read Sissons and Cordain. Miguel has posted a lot about both.

Actually there was a thread a while ago about posting Paleo recipes, not sure how that is going to progress.

Guess I hit a nerve.

It doesn't really bother me what other people do and want to think; after all it's their body and health. However, I have gone through a hell of a lot of suffering and fear in dealing with the often destructive effects of diabetes, including a number of times almost dying, and my motivation is that I want to stay alive and live as long as possible without complications or suffering. In order to do that I have to learn, for myself, what is possible and necessary. Following quackery or some fad does me absolutely no good because the consequences of tricking my body will show up, regardless of what I want to believe. Diabetes takes no sides and doesn't care what theories we might have. It will only react to what works and whatever reduces the exacerbation of the complications. At the same time, do it wrong and diabetes will destroy me without the slightest bit of conscience. It is a disease of metabolism and lifestyle.

All I can do then is to learn all I can about what causes it and what I can do to prevent the causations that manifest the complications. I've been reading all I can for 15 years now. Initially, due to my having been indoctrinated with the low-fat dogma, I concentrated on vegetarian diets and low GI carbohydrates, cutting out almost all fat. That's what my doctors all recommended, too. It never worked. My diabetic complications just kept getting worse and my insulin doses kept increasing. My doctors had no idea what was causing it, and why I was gaining so much weight, in spite of my never having eaten very much and being very physically active (I ran 10 kilometers everyday). I first found out about the low carb diet when I read Atkins in the late 90's, but I didn't trust what he recommended, mainly because of the distrust I had in fat. It was only when I read, in 1999, the first paleo book that I came across, Ray Audette's "Neanderthin" (Audette had Type 2 diabetes and arthritis and cured himself of both by severely cutting carbs), that I began to question the dogma that I'd been taught since the mid-70's. I tried on and off since then to do the paleo diet, but doubt and lack of information kept me from diving in. Living in Japan, far from all the goings on in the paleo movement, made it doubly difficult to have any idea whether going this route was safe or sound.

It was only two years ago when a friend recommended Mark Sisson's "Primal Blueprint" that everything really clicked. He explained it in terms of the metabolism of insulin and when I read that and compared it to what was happening with my body, suddenly it all made sense. When I tried it out, it worked! Within a month a fungus that had completely taken over my right hand and right foot and the right side of my face, due to high blood sugars, completely disappeared. The gastroparesis that was ravaging my stomach and esophagus disappeared. My blood sugars normalized and my dose of insulin plummeted. I lost weight. My migraines disappeared. And for the first time in 20 years my insomnia disappeared (I have only had insomnia one time since I started the diet and exercise routine last June). I was astounded, to say the least. And so was my doctor, since I had managed to do in one month what she had been unable to do in 10 years. She still remains very cautious about the whole thing, and still won't read the copies of data and abstracts that I've brought in to back up what I was doing, but she's at least willing to let me give it a go, while monitoring me.

For me this is life or death, not simply a weight loss program. I cannot be cavalier about what I eat or how I live and move. Diabetes is on my mind 24 hours a day, even when I sleep. So yes, I'd imagine that when someone makes an offhand remark about all that I've put so much effort and time and anguish into learning, cavalierly brushing aside tomes of serious studies and very concerned work by people trying to make sense of two epidemics... diabetes and obesity... that are sweeping the world, I get somewhat defensive. All I am asking is that you give the information a serious look at and not just toss it out as hogwash. I'd go further and say, give the paleo lifestyle a try and see how it works for you, but if you are healthy and happy with your body and well-being, then it might seem rather unnecessary.

I do believe, as Nick and Piper have suggested, that living this way makes your body far more efficient. For backpacking that means less weight on your back, less consumption of fuel, and longer periods of walking without constantly having to replenish caloric stores with quick spiking sugars.

Have any of you read "Primal Body, Primal Mind, Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life" by Nora T. Gedgaudas

Carl, yes, I have read her book. As you say, it is chock full of data and studies and, because she's a nutritionist, lots of sober information about how food works.

I found it very dry reading, though, and difficult to get through. I think it works better for people who already have basic knowledge of what the paleo diet is, rather than as an introduction to the diet and lifestyle. It does well to help a reader refine the questions they might have about the different aspects of nutrition. Her recommendations for supplements are invaluable, for instance.

"I do believe, as Nick and Piper have suggested, that living this way makes your body far more efficient. For backpacking that means less weight on your back, less consumption of fuel, and longer periods of walking without constantly having to replenish caloric stores with quick spiking sugars."

Miguel,
I was tracking with your post until this paragraph and completely get the logic behind what you are doing I can definitely see how you could train your body to be able to operate without external fuel sources during physical activities. I do this on a regular basis by doing runs in the 10-20 mile range without any fuel before or during the run. But unless I'm missing something, I can't possible see how your body will become more efficient and require you to consume less calories thus making your pack lighter. I suppose on a short term basis that could work if you have sufficient body fat to be handle the caloric needs of a trip but that sounds impracticle for anything except maybe a weekend trip.

If you are saying that you can hike without eating massive carbs then great, I suspect you could within some limits. But I'm missing how that translates into:

"For backpacking that means less weight on your back, less consumption of fuel"

Help!

But unless I'm missing something, I can't possible see how your body will become more efficient and require you to consume less calories thus making your pack lighter. I suppose on a short term basis that could work if you have sufficient body fat to be handle the caloric needs of a trip but that sounds impracticle for anything except maybe a weekend trip.

Please note, I did not say "less calories". You still need the same amount of calories to do the same amount of work. It is the calories that are the fuel, after all, not the macronutrients. I said, "more efficient". Fat burns very slowly in the body and packs far more calories per gram than either carbs or proteins (9 kcal/g for fat vs. 4 kcal/g for both proteins and carbs). You therefore need less weight in food for the same number of calories. The only caution you need to think about is when you are doing high amounts of anaerobic exercise, such as fast climbing with big loads or running high above your maximum heart rate. At those times carbs work better than fat... and stave off bonking. But it is not as efficient as fats and the effects drop off very quickly.

By "consumption of fuel" I meant the fuel for your stove, not the fuel you are eating! :-)

Edited by butuki on 02/29/2012 19:59:38 MST.

Now it makes sense. You are taking more fats vs. Carbs and that should get you higher calorie per oz. I will have to give this some thought. I have a number of long hikes/runs planned in the upcoming weeks. Normally I am carb heavy and it has worked beautifully. I may have to do a hike where I try higher fat vs. carbs and see what happens. I have no doubt that it would work in low intensity, but how intense could I go with high fat vs carbs.

" I have no doubt that it would work in low intensity, but how intense could I go with high fat vs carbs."

That depends to a large degree on your VO2 max, Greg. The higher your VO2 max the more efficiently you will be able to oxidize fat, which requiires more O2 to oxidize.
You can train to increase your VO2 max, which will in turn increase your ability to use fat at higher levels of intensity when exercising. Even so, from what exercise physiology I have read, a certain amount of carbs are required to support the oxidization of fat withing cells in a process called "The Krebs Cycle" or "Citric Acid Cycle", so you can't completely eliminate them from your diet.

I'm not trying to be down on anyone, in part because I think we are different, and all have to find our groove. I hike with some fast happy vegans and some fast happy carnivores.

FWIW:

"A new diet study just out from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition went to a lot of trouble to prove the obvious. When it comes to weight loss, how much you eat matters more than the proportion of fat, carbohydrate, and protein in your foods."

That comes from a very good blog, Food Politics. I have it in my daily RSS feed.

My personal attitude is that my body runs well on food ;-), and I try to give it a good mix of real food. I try to eat more veg than my natural tendency. I try to stay away from processed things. I prefer strip-mall Cambodian joints to fast food. It's the happy omnivore approach.

"A new diet study just out from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition went to a lot of trouble to prove the obvious. When it comes to weight loss, how much you eat matters more than the proportion of fat, carbohydrate, and protein in your foods."

Thanks for posting the link. I have been told that it is not as simple as this on this thread. Of course it is.

Piper - excellent article

If you eat lots of simple carbs, then you'll be hungrier so you'll eat more calories

If you can have a simple carb diet and eat less and have a healthy weight for a lifetime, more power to you, but this doesn't work for most people

"He said if you create a new market with a brand-new manufactured food, give it a brand-new fancy name, put a big advertising budget behind it, you can have a market all to yourself and force your competitors to catch up. You can't do that with fruits and vegetables. It's harder to differentiate an apple from an apple"

Everything today is dominated by how big companies can make more money

They're like a cancer that needs to be brought back under control

Here's a link to a collection of real, relevant research *on humans* that pertains to intermittent fasting:

http://alanaragon.com/an-objective-look-at-intermittent-fasting.html

It's not a rosy picture. The evidence is basically against it in most respects.

As usually turns out to be the case, results in other animals does not translate to results in humans.

Just because our ancestors lived a certain way, does not mean we should ascribe any higher or lower value to that way of living. There is basically no evolutionary pressure to live healthily to 100, so it is laughable to think that our bodies would be well-attuned to keeping themselves healthy for a very long time if only we could do what our ancestors did. There *was* a lot of evolutionary pressure to survive flashpoint situations (outrun a predator, succeed in an intense hunt, etc) which is not the way we live now at all.

Edited by dasbin on 03/01/2012 12:09:56 MST.

"Even so, from what exercise physiology I have read, a certain amount of carbs are required to support the oxidization of fat withing cells in a process called "The Krebs Cycle" or "Citric Acid Cycle", so you can't completely eliminate them from your diet."

Your body can create glucose from a variety of non-carbohydrate sources via a process called gluconeogenesis.

Some biochemical food for thought:

Glucose is metabolized via glycolysis, while fatty acids are metabolized via beta oxidation. Both yield Acetyl-CoA and electrons that are used by mitochondria via the Krebs cycle to produce ATP, which is a kind of universal energy currency within the body.

The electrons from glucose enter the mitochondria's electron transport chain at complex I, while the electrons from fatty acids enter at complex II.

Complex I leaks a substantial number of electrons before they can be utilized in the electron transport chain. Complex II doesn't. Leaked electrons form free radicals that oxidize the inner membrane of the mitochondrion, eventually triggering apoptosis and killing that mitochondrion.

Additionally, fatty acids and ketone bodies upregulate mitochondrial uncoupling proteins, which allow the electron transport chain to flow freely at "tickover" (i.e., in the presence of unused ATP) without leaking electrons. Glucose does not do this.

Lastly, fatty acids and ketone bodies increase mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle. More mitochondria means greater endurance.

This is all rather myopic, but the implications are interesting nonetheless.

"Your body can create glucose from a variety of non-carbohydrate sources via a process called gluconeogenesis."

Yes, but that process uses amino acid skeletons, and if the amino acids aren't derived from dietary protein it will come from muscle breakdown, an undesirable situation. It is also a secondary process, and not as efficient as deriving it directly from dietary or stored sources.

So, Piper, having done a couple thru-hikes, and now experiencing improved performance on the Paleo/Primal diet, can you describe how you might prepare food for a thru hike? I'm trying to wrap my head around how one would try to provide a higher fat diet for that long a time. My perception (possibly erroneous) is that higher fat content would be more likely to go rancid on the trail, since refrigeration isn't an option. I guess this is because of jerky making, trying to get as much fat out as possible, to increase shelf life. Also, the lifestyle does not lend itself to processed foods, so you'd have a lot to prepare yourself. I imagine you'd need more carbs eventually to help make up the daily calorie load too?

I get that you are currently not having to eat high volumes of food, but I should think that would change under the impact of increased calorie demand of through hiking.

Diane, that is a problem I am having, too. Still haven't figured it out yet. Hence the attempt at putting together a paleo recipe thread a while back. Hasn't been successful at all, even for me.

Yeah, I'm not into hunting or fishing, and on a through hike who's got the time? I suspect there'd be a lot of jerky/pemmican, nuts and dried fruits, foraging for veggies if encountered opportunistically, and home-dried pumpkin, sweet potato, squash, other veggies, with coconut oil/ghee. One thing I like about Mike C's approach to hiking food is the pre-made sauces. A peanut/coconut milk sauce comes to mind, a tomato sauce--then I'm stuck. Variety after a while might be the biggest problem.

My perception (possibly erroneous) is that higher fat content would be more likely to go rancid on the trail, since refrigeration isn't an option. I guess this is because of jerky making, trying to get as much fat out as possible, to increase shelf life.

This is dependent on the type of fat; saturated fats are less prone to oxidation (i.e. going rancid). When making pemmican (or jerky) the threat to shelf-life is water content rather than fat content; the meat is dried, but the fat is also "cooked" to boil out its water content. Only when as much water is possible is removed are the meat and fat recombined to form a shelf-stable product.

You could use carbs to make up for the caloric load, but the energy density will be less; the most energy per ounce will be in the fats. However, you may want this if you're expecting heavy exertion.

Jeremy put that very well re why pemmican works. And rendered fat, 50% by weight, is the fat in question. And that fat works fine on its own too, it's delicious when sourced from grass fed beef selling butchers. It's also basically free, which means you can get a high quality fairly stable fat that tastes really good for just your time and energy of rendering it. Remember, render it at under 240 degrees, not hard, but requires attention.

I am trying to think up some way to get olive oil less liquid, by mixing it with something, to make it easier to ship and store and hike with, sort of the pemmican idea except using some other dried substance.

Just a warning re rendered beef fat, this stuff is VERY hard to clean up after, so I would not use it in a cooking pot or anything else I wanted to reuse backpacking during a trip, better to use it as butter or mixing with some trail mix in a spoon or something. You can lick off the spoon or knife, pots are another matter. It would not be fun trying to clean a pot that had congealed rendered beef fat in it out in nature without super hot water. Olive oil is a lot easier to clean up after.

Pemmican works, I have made a batch some months ago now, and it sits in a plastic bag out of the fridge, I take a bite now and then to see how it is, and because it's so good, and it's fine. Because it's stored in plastic, I think I'd try to keep it to less than 6 or 8 months in storage, but that's plenty for any trip planned.

You eat pemmican alone, by itself, or as trail mix with other stuff, it's sort of soft and crumbly, sort of like a brownie or cookie dough. Except made out of meat of course.

To me it's the ideal way to actually crack the barrier and make real food for being in nature, it's so easy to see why it was considered the best food possible for long treks and cross country voyages. Keep in mind that it was developed for endurance thru-hikes long before that idea existed, back then it was known as getting from point a to point b. Of course they used bison mainly, which is much better for this style of preparation, the buffalo conveniently stores its fat on the outside, and the meat is already lean, not marbled, making the preparation a breeze. But beef works well too, just requires a little more preparation.

I'm going to use pemmican on my next trip for maybe 25% of my daily calories, give or take. With olive oil providing another maybe 500 calories a day, that's less weight too to carry, fat is the best source for energy. My feeling is that if I overdo miles, which I won't do, the solution isn't to switch to high calorie sugar powders or energy drinks, it's to cut down the miles until my body can actually do them eating natural food sources. I'd love to see a long term study of people who use the high sugar energy sources primarily and their rates of adult onset diabetes, that's such a deeply unnatural diet I find it hard to believe there are no long term serious health risks.

" I'd love to see a long term study of people who use the high sugar energy sources primarily and their rates of adult onset diabetes, that's such a deeply unnatural diet I find it hard to believe there are no long term serious health risks."

It would be interesting to also see a long term study of people who use animal fat as a primary source of energy, and compare it with the high sugar energy sources study for incidence of mortality and morbidity later in life.

Harald, what specifically are you using to grind the dried meat?

I do have a local bison producer, need to make contact with them and start using their products. They have jerky available, but I'm pretty sure they don't make pemmican.

Tom those studies were completed decades ago, they are called the Inuit, who were unfortunately subjected as involuntary guinea pigs in such a change of diet, all under well meaning policies of feeding them under various programs after we took their actual food sources away in various land grabs etc, but with grain based food stuffs that we use. The answer was, they were far healthier using a protein/fat diet, in almost every way. That diet was also much better suited to to their environment. It's an interesting topic, more interesting than I'd realized before reading this book: 'People of the Deer', by Farley Mowat, is a good first hand account of a lot of the direct diet issues, especially interesting are his observations and discussions of just what happened when starch and sugar based energy sources were introduced into their diet, not a pretty sight, he basically watched as this inland eskimo caribou hunting tribe vanished, around the 1940s. If I remember right, turns out that there is basically no better food source for such cold climates, something that was recently tested in Alaska by a group of Norwegians, eating real meats, also verified this finding, don't have link on that one, sorry.

However, I don't want suggest I'm interested in that extreme of meat/fat only, I'm not, I am just very skeptical of diets that are based on heavy consumption of sugars, something that was basically unheard of up to 100 years ago, or less. This to me is pure common sense, our bodies were not designed to be fueled on sugar, the easy availability of sugars is so recent biologically speaking that I seriously doubt our body's have had any chance to adapt to that. The slow release burn of fats strikes me as conveniently similar to the type of slow burn you do in prolonged but not extreme exercise, for example, walking a long time, but not an absurd amount, and at a reasonable speed, to be determined by the burn rate of your body re fats. Certainly would not be a surprise to me that that is how the human body works at its most efficient. I suspect strongly that eating basically pure sugar for energy is not unlike taking crystal methamphetamine for energy, yes it works, but at what long term cost? And more important? Why? I know why tour de france racers do it, there's millions at stake if they win or lose. Worth the risk I guess to them. But if you are going out to nature? Who are you competing against that you need this type of artificial boost?

There's something odd to me about the extreme of all meat/fat vs basically primarily sugar, simple sugars, as the options some people chose. Both seem a bit over the top to me.

Diane, grinding it is very easy. I have an old metal blender, decent motor, but nothing unusual, what I do is when the meat is snap dry, which means you can snap or crack the thin slices you have dried, instead of them bending (this is very obvious, it's not subtle, the first time you see it, you will understand), I take a handful and put it in the blender, and start blending it. It helps to sort of pulse it so the heavier stuff falls down. After a while, the meat turns into a primaloft like puffy filament. I take that out, and pick out the unground little pieces, then do the next batch. It doesn't take that long, and of course, the stronger the motor, the easier it is to do. But no special tools are required except a thermometer to check temp of dehydrator (best under 120 F), and rendered fat as it renders (best under 240 F at all times, if it gets close to that, it's time to lower temp, and if it won't go down, it's as done as your stove will get it).

Wellness meat can sell the easy part that costs you nothing, the rendered fat, but they can't do low temp air dried meat, can't be sold in the US, I wish they would stop advertising their products as pemmican and call them something else.

By the way, an incredibly delicious and quite durable cured meat is Spanish Jamon, has various types, Serrano is I think the most common in the US. It is only relatively recently that this was allowed to be imported, for the same reason, it's not cooked. But Spanish pork is clean, inspected, and has no parasites. That would be in my opinion be the very best trail mix supplement I could imagine, costs about 20 a pound if you find a decent source. Maybe somewhere online is less. What we get in the US is low grade stuff they dump because we don't know any better, but it's all better than any Prosciutto I've ever tried here. Good salamis are pretty durable too, as long as they don't use those vile preservatives in them, some do, some don't.

What I'd like to do is just get a lot of the junk stuff I carry out, and replace it with high quality fats, I know exactly what I was craving after my last trip, and it was fat, pure and simple. My body was pretty unambiguous in this message, so I know what I was missing in that diet of dried foods. And, in keeping with bpl focus on weight, conveniently nothing touches fat for calories per ounce. Or density, it's worth noting. Pack small, pack light, those Indians were onto something I'd say.

Edited by hhope on 03/02/2012 19:52:01 MST.

"I do believe, as Nick and Piper have suggested, that living this way makes your body far more efficient. For backpacking that means less weight on your back, less consumption of fuel, and longer periods of walking without constantly having to replenish caloric stores with quick spiking sugars."

Yes, FINALLY. Somebody is getting it!

And yes, it depends upon a certain measure of body fat. But even someone with a nice lean body will have at least 20,000 calories of spare body fat to use. I think you can get pretty far on that plus a pack full of pemmican.

And for those who want to experiment with this, you really have to go low carb for a while to get your body to adjust to using ketones for energy. If you don't go through the adjustment period, your body won't be able to do it and you will bonk really bad. It took me 5 weeks to ketoadapt and now, even though I eat about 50-60g of carbs a day, I still have a day or two of adjustment to get back to it. I try to have some days higher carb and some days low and I eat my carbs mostly during dinner.

By the way, before anybody gets alarmed at so low carbs, I am 5'3" tall, female and 47 years old. I do not need to eat a lot of food, period, carbs or otherwise. 50g of carbs is a larger proportion for me than it might be for a big muscly man. 50g of carbs gives me a revved up energy that any big man would get on 150g or more. I can exercise HARD, run up a mountain, go to my fitness class and do planks and feel strong and powerful on so little carbs. It's enough for me. It all comes from squash, sweet potatoes, vegetables or dark chocolate (hey, nobody's perfect.)

But if I make the adjustment to ketones, then go for a backpack trip running on ketones, I can just hike slow and steady all day without hunger, without flagging energy and without having to eat all the time. After my experience on the PCT where I had to eat any time the trail wasn't going downhill, this has been SO AMAZING and wonderful.

As for what to eat on a really long hike, pemmican! It's what the native Americans ate. Apparently you could eat this stuff for half a year and not get any vitamin deficiency diseases. Apparently you can eat this stuff and not get bored with it, too. Coconut products are another option. And since rice isn't going to kill you with antinutrients making a coconut curry with rice noodles would work. I am pretty good at identifying plants so I know what plants I can eat locally to supplement.

If anyone is interested in a paleo diet you don't have to do it low carb. It's not required. I benefit from it because my long distance hiking hosed my metabolism and left me insulin resistant and leptin resistant. You will naturally be lower in carbs than people who eat a lot of pastries and sandwiches and there might be some adjustments, but you can eat 200, 300g of carbs on a paleo diet if you want and still reap the benefits of improved health and vitality.

Here's a progress picture of me. Please keep in mind that my appearance is really secondary. I'm not dieting. I'm healing from insulin and leptin resistance and whatever else. I feel absolutely fabulous. I have never felt like this in my life. My mental health is off the charts. My energy level is high and even. I am getting stronger. I eat whatever I want. The beauty is that this way of eating has made it so that what I want is the same as what I eat. Here is a typical day of food. I don't see how you can fault this:

Breakfast
2 eggs and a small steak or liver and onions, 1-3 cups coffee with half-and-half
Lunch
Bone broth with seaweed or can of fish (salmon or sardines) or nothing
Dinner
Meat (sea, air or land), vegetables (any kind), a root or tuber (celery root, rutabaga, sweet potatoes), butter, red wine
Dessert
Dark chocolate

Okay, here's the picture:

Yes, FINALLY. Somebody is getting it!

Erm, I sort of "got" it from the start, since I've been one of the ones arguing in favor of the diet from the start. Or have I been too tight-lipped? :^)

If you want a picture of what eating paleo looks like, please visit Nom Nom Paleo. The author takes photos of her daily meals and you really get a sense of how healthy it is. I think a lot of people have a weird image of it being a fat encrusted, oil fest, but it's really not.

Edited by butuki on 03/02/2012 20:31:50 MST.

But even someone with a nice lean body will have at least 20,000 calories of spare body fat to use

I have to disagree with this. I'm currently 130 lbs and 6-7% fat. That means I have 10 lbs of bodyfat total. If I were to lose ~6 lbs of additional fat I'd likely need to be hospitalized.

Edit: I guess it depends on what you define as "lean".

Edited by simplespirit on 03/02/2012 20:26:34 MST.

"Tom those studies were completed decades ago, they are called the Inuit, who were unfortunately subjected as involuntary guinea pigs in such a change of diet,"

They had thousands of years to adapt to a ketogenic diet and not much choice if they were going to live in the Arctic. I was referring to studies of our own population.

"However, I don't want suggest I'm interested in that extreme of meat/fat only, I'm not, I am just very skeptical of diets that are based on heavy consumption of sugars, something that was basically unheard of up to 100 years ago, or less. This to me is pure common sense, our bodies were not designed to be fueled on sugar, the easy availability of sugars is so recent biologically speaking that I seriously doubt our body's have had any chance to adapt to that. The slow release burn of fats strikes me as conveniently similar to the type of slow burn you do in prolonged but not extreme exercise, for example, walking a long time, but not an absurd amount, and at a reasonable speed, to be determined by the burn rate of your body re fats. Certainly would not be a surprise to me that that is how the human body works at its most efficient. I suspect strongly that eating basically pure sugar for energy is not unlike taking crystal methamphetamine for energy, yes it works, but at what long term cost? And more important? Why?"

The interesting thing to me in this regard is that the human body has evolved to store ~1600 calories of energy as glycogen, mostly in the muscles, but also in the liver. It did so for a reason: That capability contributed to survival, otherwise it would have been selected out of the gene pool long ago. Glycogen, stripped of it's water molecules, i.e. glucose, provides energy more rapidly than fat and is thus useful for situations where a more intense level of activity than can be supported by slower burning fat is required. Glucose also supports the metabolism of
fat in the Krebs Cycle, although there is a backup, less efficient, mechanism called gluconeogenisis for emergencies where glucose from stored glycogen or dietary glucose is not available. How did this contribute to survival? Quite probably in situations where man had to move faster than he could by burning fat, i.e. hunting or being hunted, or in combat situations. I could speculate that the maximum distance he would have had to run in such situations is somewhere between 18 and 20 miles, precisely the distance where modern marathoners "hit the wall". Elite runners can go farther due to their highly developed VO2 max, but for most muscle glycogen is exhausted at that distance. As for backpacking, a high fat diet makes a lot of sense as the intensity of the activity is well suited to the use of slow burnig fat as fuel, and fat is a denser source of energy. This does not mean eliminating carbohydrates from a backpacking diet, IMO. Rather, the goal should be to provide the proper amount of carbs to support the efficient metabolism of fat at the level of intensity you hike at without going into gluconeogenisis. For me, the amount of carbs turns out to be ~30%.

Having said all of this, I am not dissing the Paleo diet or addressing the situation of those who are either unable to process carbs, trying to lose weight, or just plain want to do things that way. I am only saying that for many of us, a balanced diet that allows us to use the natural glycogen system we were born with, in concert with our fat burning capability is a viable option, one that has apparently served the majority of humans in good stead down thru the millenia.


All this is not to say I am in favor of a high sugar diet, any more than I am in favor of a high fat or high protein diet.
Moderation in all things is my dietary maxim.


Edited several times to avoid timing out.

Edited by ouzel on 03/02/2012 20:55:49 MST.

I have to disagree with this. I'm currently 130 lbs and 6-7% fat. That means I have 10 lbs of bodyfat total. If I were to lose ~6 lbs of additional fat I'd likely need to be hospitalized.

There is something called "underweight", too. Being too lean. My thinking is that, like bears inadequately prepared body fat-wise for over-wintering, having too little body fat for long periods of exertion is probably not a healthy or safe state to be in. I also think that the body is not meant to be a static number, but is supposed to adapt to conditions. There's a very good reason why the body has the ability to gain and lose weight; it's part of the body's interaction with the environment. And that includes being able to carry the energy needed to do the movement we need to do.

Well, I'm not underweight per se. Just lean. 3-4% would be dangerously lean which I'd have to try really hard to hit in normal daily life and it wouldn't be maintainable. If I went out on a long trip with too little food though....

I think it just depends on what you define as being lean to some extent. 15% is healthy for a man but isn't what most would consider lean. You typically need to be 8% or less to see good abdominal definition and that's probably what most people would classify as being "lean". Great for walking around the gym or beach and perfectly healthy in our normal society. On a Skurka-like trip though, if someone in similar condition carried what they eat in town, they'd fail fast and hard.

I can easily go out and run 10-20 miles or hike 30+ in a day as-is but day after day would be pushing it without carrying a load of food. It's a bit of a dilemma, and definitely something people should consider when throwing around the "just lose the gut" statements as opposed to packing less. I have to pack what is likely an exponentially larger amount of insulation now than I did when I was fatter. Food for thought.

Edit: Basically I agree with Miguel. I'd have to fatten up a good bit to take on a 4000+ mile hike without a lot of resupply opportunity. I still think saying most "lean" people having 20k+ cals of fat to spare is not true though.

Edited by simplespirit on 03/02/2012 20:58:05 MST.

I know lots of you got it at the start. Someone was explaining my strategy better than me.

I do eat less now. I'm not denying there are fewer calories. But I'm not starving all the time. I'm almost not hungry at all. The kind of dinner I eat now used to leave me starving. Now it doesn't. I think the big difference is no more soy, no more vegetable oil (we used olive oil), no more grains, very little dairy and no more dang jogging at lunch. There are still plenty of healthy things to eat without trying to stuff more and more pasta or fruit in to quell the unquenchable hunger I used to have. No gritting my teeth to make it more than 2 hours between eating.

I'm looking forward to making pemmican someday. A local grass-fed beef farmer has kidney fat for sale in addition to beef. But I still have about 30 US Wellness pemmican bars in the freezer.

>>>They had thousands of years to adapt to a ketogenic diet and not much choice if they were going to live in the Arctic. I was referring to studies of our own population.
<<<

What is "our own population". I am Swedish and Finnish by 50%. That's arctic. The rest of me is other northern/western European. What do the native Finns eat? Reindeer, fish, rye, tubers and berries and greens and mushrooms when in season (you can imagine the season is short.)

What am I eating now that is restoring me to health? Beef, fish, tubers, vegetables, mushrooms and eggs mostly. Not much different from what "my population" eats. Never could stand that hard-tack rye bread. My relatives still try to push that on me, bringing back piles of it from the U.P.

"What do the native Finns eat? Reindeer, fish, rye, tubers and berries and greens and mushrooms when in season (you can imagine the season is short.)"

That's a function of location based on available food sources. Ask the same thing to a Samoan and the answer will be much different.

You are not a native Finn so the argument is moot.

Of course, times have changed:

http://www.livestrong.com/article/376342-diet-nutrition-in-finland/

The horrors - they eat bread.

Edited by FamilyGuy on 03/03/2012 08:51:56 MST.

Okay, while I see and sympathize with the doubts that people express, my only retort is that you refrain from judging this way of eating and living, and condemning it without having properly done the reading about it and tried it for yourself. This is a physical thing that no amount of discussing theory here is going to prove either way to someone who is unwilling to give it a go and keep an open mind with. As someone expressed earlier, it is no different from traditional backpackers ridiculing UL without learning more about it and trying it out. Until you try it and see how it actually works on your own body, you really have no basis in condemning it.

I'm surprised by the hard-headedness of some people here. If you don't like it and have made up your mind that it is hogwash, then please go somewhere else and put your debate prowess to use there. Here we are trying to come up with ways of making the ketogenic diet work while hiking, not trying to spend all our online time having to refute naysayers and educate them. It really is frustrating that the paleo people cannot engage in this conversation without being challenged about everything we are trying to talk about.

As an open forum it is vital to educate anyone reading this thread. For every 'expert' that claims such a diet is healthy for the long term, I can find one that claims a balanced approach (see Tom K's commentary) is better for the long term. This information must be conveyed to permit the reader to make decisions on their own and / or persue the necessary channels.

Your comparison between traditional backpacking and UL backpacking is interesting. Dropping pack weight is always a good thing unless you push to levels which decrease your safety in certain conditions (winter, desert, etc). A level of moderation is key. The Ketogenic diet does not pursue those tenants.

Beginning in my early teenage years my life focus has been on endurance related physical training/competition and a sound healthy diet. To be honest I had, prior to this thread, never heard of some of the diets mentioned here.

What is interesting and has worked amazingly well for me is the following as it relates to diet and training;

5:00 am to 5 pm; meals using whole grains (muesli/10 grain cereal but no breads), low fat/non fat protein, fruit and raw nuts.

5:00 pm to 5:00 am; low fat protein, fresh vegetables and no complex carbs (ketogenic ?).

My am workout is before 5:00 am and prior having any carbs for the day. My pm workout is after 5:00 pm with no complex carbs after this workout.

This diet/workout regime works well "for me". I have strong energy reserves for workouts and my metabolism seems to thrive on the diet as described.

Workouts are mainly focused on endurance sports/activities (road and trail running, spinning, high mileage hiking) mixed with a strong dose of free weight core type exercises (pull ups, chin ups, dips, push ups, high rep full range "sissy" squats and lunges and abdominal work).

Edited by thomdarrah on 03/03/2012 10:00:44 MST.

I think the discussion about the validity of the diet is going on with Doug's thread, but this thread was started by Piper asking about doing a ketogenic diet specifically for hiking, not whether the ketogenic diet is valid or not. In the same vein that anti-gun advocates are asked not to derail the threads of those wanting to discuss gun use in the back country, so does the argument not to derail the conversation over the desire to learn to use the ketogenic diet for hiking hold, no?

The Ketogenic diet does not pursue those tenants.

Where in the world did you come up with that conclusion? Those of us here who are following the paleo diet are asking that very question and are trying to learn about it and how it can be done. Nothing definitive has come up yet, except for a few suggestions like pemmican and coconut-based food. And yet you, who are unwilling to give the diet even a partial chance, already conclude with "does not pursue those tenants"? What "tenants" are you talking about? Paleo isn't a religion or a set way of doing things. It's a lifestyle that is actively looking at scientific information and personal trials and results to find the healthiest way to live for humans. It's changing all the time and people are learning all the time. That's what we are trying to explore here, within the framework of hiking.

I do not understand your need to just disagree with all this all the time. Why don't you at least give it a try instead of bringing up these arguments all the time? How about some constructive and experienced input? At least Tom is trying to see both sides and doing the reading behind it. I hate to say it because I don't want to start a fight, but Dave you seem awfully contrary for no reason but to be contrary. Why? Do you dislike us paleo enthusiasts so much?

Forgive me everyone for getting a little too carried away with my support for this whole way of living. I'm sure I come across as quite, as Nick Gatel privately put it, "fanatical". That quite surprised me, because all my life I've been very willing to listen and learn. I hope I don't get so caught up in all this that I fail to hear what others are trying to say.

Paleo is not set in stone for me. I'm just very enthusiastic about a way of living and eating that has helped me bring my diabetes under control when nothing else worked, and in the process have learned a great amount about nutrition and exercise. But it is still very much ongoing and i have a lot to learn still. I've only scratched the surface. If I come across as a know-it--all, forgive me.

Edited by butuki on 03/03/2012 10:45:10 MST.

Decided to delete this post.

Edited by dasbin on 03/03/2012 13:58:49 MST.

Thanks to Piper S for starting this thread and for the great information posted so far ! Roleigh the links to the Paleo sites were great and after reading Mark Sisson's blog and ordering his books I decided to give it a shot.

Before I go into results, some background - I'm early 40s in reasonable shape but have noticed in the last few years the 'stomach' creep. One of the great jokes of the universe is making beer fattening. After weighing myself for the first time in a while in Jan I was a tad shocked to find I was 68kg as opposed to my normal 63/64Kg. So not a huge gain I know - but I could tell and apart from the weight and fat :-) I was starting to feel sluggish...

My experience over the past few years is that I was becoming less efficient at staving off fat and weight gain. Something I had never done was count calories so I gave that a shot as it was highly logical - control consumption and measure activity and you generate a caloric deficiency and hence weight loss. QED. After 6 months of tracking calories daily and measuring exercise, there was very little difference. I'll add to this that my exercise was reasonably intense mainly boxing (in a ring) and kettlebells.

One day I listened to a podcast by a nutritionist (western doctor) and a body builder (natural) / personal trainer and they said something which got my attention: if they had to choose between advising their clients on whether to count calories or pay attention to what they are eating, then the latter would win hands down. One of them was on the Paleo diet and I had also heard this mentioned elsewhere. Quite frankly I couldn't imagine anything worse than some caveman diet. It sounded bland and uninteresting. Nevertheless for two weeks I simply cut out refined carbohydrates and low and behold I last about an inch around my waist. Then in the manner of wonderful human logic, I went back to my old diet and forgot all about it...

After seeing the weight gain in Jan and reading this thread, I researched Paleo and kicked it off at the end of Jan. I'm five weeks into the diet (I've been very strict) and I'm back to 63 kg and have lost 2" off my waist. My energy feels great and I have to say I see no reason now not to continue this way of eating. In terms of calories I'm consuming around the same or more calories that I had before and exercising less.

Now to figure out what to eat on the trail...

I appreciate that you are interested in all of this, Miguel.

I'm curious about any experience you have had backpacking with paleo. Paleo isn't necessarily low carbohydrate. For lots of people it's quite high in carbs. So just because you know about paleo doesn't mean I should assume you are low carb.

I was pretty amazed at how little I need to eat if I keep my carbs low, and yet I have enough energy for hiking and backpacking. It got me thinking hey, here's a way to shed a little pack weight.

It's not going to hurt anyone to eat a bunch of meat and coconut and whatever else like that for a week or a weekend. Isn't that what backpackers and climbers used to do? Bring sticks of butter and containers of olive oil and try to maximize fats to stay warm and fit more calories in a smaller space? Just because I bring meat candles instead of peanut butter, others need to shout "the horrors, the horrors"?

Anyway, I woke up starving this morning. Had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Did a hike (somewhere between 10 and 14 miles) but did not eat during the entire hike. Drank some Endurolyte Fizz things, but did not eat. No hunger, no flagging energy, felt great. If it hadn't been such a hot day, I could have done the hike with my little ultramarathon runner vest instead of my camelback pack--ultralight dayhiking. But I needed more than a liter of water today so no chance to try it out.

P.S. Hey, that's great news, Dale. You must have posted at the same time I did. It does feel good to feel so good, doesn't it?

Edited by sbhikes on 03/03/2012 17:13:34 MST.

" What do the native Finns eat? Reindeer, fish, rye, tubers and berries and greens and mushrooms when in season (you can imagine the season is short.)"

It's a little more extensive than that as far as carbs are concerned, Piper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_cuisine

I'll let it go at that because I feel like I've already intruded in a discussion that I had no business participating in. I will follow the thread with interest from the sidelines from here on. My apologies to all paleo afficionados.

"Anyway, I woke up starving this morning. Had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Did a hike (somewhere between 10 and 14 miles) but did not eat during the entire hike. Drank some Endurolyte Fizz things, but did not eat. No hunger, no flagging energy, felt great. If it hadn't been such a hot day, I could have done the hike with my little ultramarathon runner vest instead of my camelback pack--ultralight dayhiking. But I needed more than a liter of water today so no chance to try it out."

Piper, I believe you are crediting your diet for something that is very easy to explain. I routinely do longer runs than your hike without eating and I'm not the least bit hungry during the run. In fact on longer runs and hikes I have to force myself to eat in order to not bonk after a couple/few hours of activity. Taking a middle ground of 12 miles you likely burned a bit north of 1200 calories. Even if your body had only 1000 calories of accessable energy stored then you could easily burn off the remainder of the 200+ calories from fat since it likely took you about 4 hours to do the 12 miles.

Take today, I did a 20 mile run only eating about 400 calories 3 hours before the run. I attempted to do the full 20 miles without fueling but I knew at the halfway point that I wasn't going to hit the 20 mile mark without some fuel. In my case I weigh about 190lb and at a 7mph pace I was burning 140 calories per mile. That was a burn of 1400 calories and I had plenty of stored energy and energy from fat burning to cover that. But I didn't have 2800 calories and that is why I ate.

So bottom line, glad the diet is working for you but I think that you are attributing some hiking success to the diet that has little to do with it.

Edited by gg-man on 03/03/2012 18:19:29 MST.

"P.S. Hey, that's great news, Dale. You must have posted at the same time I did. It does feel good to feel so good, doesn't it?"

Hi Piper

I kicked this off on the 23rd Jan (actually made a note of it !)so into week 6 now. Definitely the difference in energy is a huge bonus. Also exploring varieties of food I haven't eaten before has been fun.

Reading through the thread I see a lot of diverse opinions :-) At the end of the day who cares what your diet is as long as it works for you. In my opinion the fun starts to go south when fundamentalism in any form rocks up. The Paleo diet worked for me and there are plenty of diets working for others. Including this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/dining/28Rudn.html?_r=3

Native Finnish diet (the Sami people), not "Finnish cuisine". That's like the difference between Native American diet and "American cuisine".

Piper do you have any updates on this experiment? Has it proven to be effective/practical on numerous hikes?

I definetly want to try this on my next hike, I'll be eating pemmican for 75% of my sustenance, cooked home-made paleo dinners(lamb and sweet potatoe) for added enjoyment, some coconut butter to add some variety and dried plantains for starch if I really need it. I've estimated that I should be able to easily get by with just under 1 lb. of food per day. Needless to say, the weight savings definetly adds up! It's a shame ultralighters overlook this, but I have to believe it's due to our fear of animal fat and the need for "heart healthy whole grains" that has been drilled into us since birth. But I digress....

Do you generally try to stay in ketosis or did you have to alter your diet prior to the hike? One more thing....you were questioning weather or not staying in ketosis can help keep you warmer. This is an n=1 scenerio but I firmly believe it's true somehow although I don't know what the mechanism would be. Perhaps your correct about the slow burn of fat even while sleeping. I've found that since eating paleo and more specifically, adding more animal fat and coconut fat to my diet that I have become much more "warm-blooded". I used to be cold all the time, especially my hands and feet. Now I notice that I'm the last person to complain about being cold at work or home. Here is an anectode...most traditional cultures that live in tropical/warm climates eat a lot of fruit. Those in cold climates eat a lot of FAT(and meat). I have to believe that evolution has played a roll in this.

I'll sign off before this gets too long, looking forward to getting your update...
Junto

"One more thing....you were questioning weather or not staying in ketosis can help keep you warmer. This is an n=1 scenerio but I firmly believe it's true somehow although I don't know what the mechanism would be. Perhaps your correct about the slow burn of fat even while sleeping. I've found that since eating paleo and more specifically, adding more animal fat and coconut fat to my diet that I have become much more "warm-blooded". I used to be cold all the time, especially my hands and feet. Now I notice that I'm the last person to complain about being cold at work or home. Here is an anectode...most traditional cultures that live in tropical/warm climates eat a lot of fruit. Those in cold climates eat a lot of FAT(and meat)."

The northern Natives I lived with would usually suggest eating more fat if someone complained of being cold when on a trap line, etc. In their minds, eating fat equaled warmth when out in very cold weather. Their traditional diet had very, very few carbs; energy came from fat, period.

BTW, I've got all the stuff to make a basic pemmican this weekend. I'll post pictures of the process, and comments on palatability when it's done. I've got suet to render, and some lean beef to dry and grind. I'm not planning on using any berries - any dried cranberries I can find locally have a high "sugar added" content, and I can't find any fresh or frozen cranberries in the store, since we're past the holiday season. Wish me luck!

Best of luck to you Grampa! Looking forward to hearing how it turns out for you.

I'm going to do the same as soon as I can get my hands on some grass fed tallow. I'll be adding dried blueberries to mine, I'll let you know how it turns out.

Were you able to cook up some pemmican this weekend Grampa? I just found a source for small quantities of grass-fed tallow so I'm one step closer.

Yup! Posted it right here:

http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/forums/thread_display.html?forum_thread_id=61275


Sorry about all the "P's" in the titles!

I am going on a trip this weekend. I haven't shopped for food yet, but I have a freezer full of US Wellness Pemmican. I eat carbs daily but not a lot. Under 100g for sure. I don't want to get unadapted for my test here. I'm not sure what food I'm going to bring yet. I mean, should I really test ultralight food or should I bring a big steak and live it up?

Anyway, I did experiment in daily life with eating more carbs on a daily basis and my intense hunger started to come back. I guess you have to get all broken from long distance hiking like I did to understand the huge difference between being able to hike all day without hunger and not being able to. Also, as I've lost 25lbs, I think I'm reaching the limit of my "unlimited" energy reserves since I have so much less of it now. What's left, while quite ample, doesn't want to be used. Still, the calmness of my hunger now compared to how it used to be is so much better.

On our last BPing trip we wanted to keep meals as Paleo/Primal as possible, but ended up making one concession--using white rice for our Freezer Bag dinners. I experimented with dehydrating sweet potatoes to make sweet potato flour (next time I would just buy it--too labor intensive!) which I used with dried ham for a hot breakfast. We brought foil tuna packets and mayo, nuts, cheese, dried fruit, Larabars, homemade jerky... Dinners were Chicken Curry (with rice--I think you could make it without rice...maybe dehydrated "riced" cauliflower?), and an italian style beef, tomato, rice FB meal. 85% dark chocolate and nuts for dessert. Yum. We ate very well. I have some experimenting to do with some cauliflower, since I made a very tasty cauliflower/cheese crust pizza tonight and it's good for pork fried "rice". Maybe I can do something FBC with it.

I used to use white rice, but now can't really eat it anymore, it has no food value beyond empty carbs, and the flavor is weird after moving to all whole grains.

However, it's easy to do brown rice, cook it, then dehydrate it. Takes a while to dry it out, but it rehydrates fine.

Same for yukon golds, my favorite, cook them whole, slice thin then cube, then dry. It's almost impossible to cut these after they are dry, as I discovered my first attempt. So cube to size then dry.

Both of the above are easy to do, and can be done months in advance of the trip, the stuff is totally dried and just sites there from what I can see.

Hi Piper - I'm a noob on this board, but I found this thread and wanted to share my perspective with you. I've hiked ketogenic for the past two seasons - gearing up for my 3rd now. I have found hugely positive results from keeping my carbs under about 100g/day while hiking all day long.

I rely on lots of coconut oil and butterfat (both in powdered form), make a home-made trail mix (which according to a fitday analysis is practically a superfood in and of itself), and paleo- (or at least primal-) FBC meals, home-made, of course. I've forgone the pemmican as superfluous and boring.

I've hiked and been active all my life, yet still found myself in my late 30's, out of shape and obese. Despite that, I would still charge thru the Cascade and Olympic Mtns like nobody's business, tearing myself up the whole way. It would take a week to recover from a weekend hike, we won't talk about longer hikes. Going UL didn't help much.

Going keto did. We'll skip over what led me to go keto to begin with, but it left me feeling so strong and vital, I couldn't wait to hit the trails. I found being VLC provided me limitless energy and increased strength, no cramps and spasms at the end of the day, huge mileage every day (I now do 2o miles min/day, vs 15 miles max/day), and a happy mood the whole time. I can carry twice the amount of food in the same bear canister, making for much longer solo trips.

For going keto, every personal measure of hiking fulfillment has gone up. Of course, it takes a bit of prep - my transition lasts about 6 weeks, and it's not fun, to be honest. I am thinking that next winter, perhaps, I won't indulge in holiday carb-binging... see where that leaves me going into training season.

Anyway, that's my n=1. I'll never hike loaded down by carby food again. Awesome thread!

Hey Daniel, awesome you have such good results. I feel similarly. I get this limitless energy. It just feels so completely different from the way things used to be.

Harald, I'm going to have to try doing some dried sweet potato cubes. I remember trying to dry some sliced potatoes once but I needed to have a dentist on hand if I wanted to eat them.

Kimberly, coconut curry was what I brought for my first night this weekend. Very tasty. No rice, just tuna. I had hoped to put wild edibles in there but didn't find any near my campsite.

Here's the food I brought:

Top left to right:
Tuna in oil, coconut manna, dried onions, curry powder and Thai Kitchen green curry (tasty!); US Wellness Pemmican bars; Theo 91% chocolate; Starbucks Via packets; Beef jerky (uneaten); Date/walnut bar, fig/almond bar (my only carbs, mostly not eaten) and French Mimolette cheese; macadamia and brazil nuts. Mostly no-cook food because we anticipated the possibility of not being able to cook the 2nd day. I brought too much food. I could have gone lighter.

Eating foods like this might not be any lighter since they aren't dehydrated and I always bring too much anyway. But they are high calorie and high fat so during my trip this weekend when I got hypothermic, even though I had no-cook foods, I feel their high fat content helped a lot.

I wrote up a trip report about this if you are interested.

Daniel: Where did you find the powdered coconut oil and the powdered butterfat? I'm REALLY interested in this!

Emergency Essentials has cubed/dried sweet potatoes available, in 4 ounce and # 10 tins. I have tried them for a "breakfast" treat with chicken and maple sugar with cinnamon, didn't rehydrate well, think they needed longer or hotter--I was "camping" in a hotel and using a microwave. I was thinking of blenderizing them next time to improve hydration.

Wow, 91%?

I can only find 87% ;)

Google up "Sweet Potato Flour" and you should find some sources for sweet potato that will rehydrate more easily. This is basically what I made myself--the hard way (bake, dehydrate, freeze, grind), but it is too much work for something you can purchase online (and organic).

Packit Gourmet has dehydrated butter powder, and some other interesting stuff. I use their powdered tomato for some of my FB meals.

piper.. check out theprimalblueprint.com

it's a website with info about high fat diets like yours. basically carbs aren't nearly as necessary as we have been told. high fat diets are a lot healthier and efficient for your body, etc.

Edited by TranscendingWalden on 04/14/2012 19:14:34 MDT.

piper, I cut the potatoes into about 3/16, 1/4" thick slices once they have cooled down, then cut those into little squares. Maybe 1/2" on a side max, then put them on the drying trays. I cut out some screen and put it into the drying tray to keep the little pieces from falling down.

My first attempt I didn't cube them after slicing, and had to use a hammer pounding on a towel wrapped around the potatoes to crack them, a big mortar/pestle barely dented them. Took so long to break up the big pieces I decided that the extra cubing time was time well spent.

These will rehydrate quite nicely with a cozy, takes about 15 minutes, 20 to be safe. They don't get soft like a potato again, but they get chewable, and taste really good, and also don't fall apart into mush. I'd guess that if you are going to be high, 8k or more, you might want to slice it thinner to start since the water won't get as hot.

This stuff gets so dry you can probably make a year's worth at a time safely I'd guess, like the dried boiled brown rice.

Slicing the potatoes is a bit time consuming, but just put on the radio or something and be zen about it, when you're done you're done and can do other stuff.

This stuff is so relatively easy to make that I can see no reason to ever buy it, the only real time is the drying part, plus you can source the potatoes/rice and end up with far better quality than you'd buy.

Edited by hhope on 04/16/2012 11:45:39 MDT.