You might want to say something like “quick” instead of “fast” because homonyms (I first thought you were going to talk about intermittent fasting, which didn’t make sense because of the hypoglycemia).
Why are you skeptical of whey protein? I’ve only ever heard good stuff, and I’ve spent enough time reading about nutrition to construct not-unreasonable arguments against almost every food. (Vegetables? Plants don’t want to be eaten (except for fruit), so they contain bad-to-eat chemicals that humans almost certainly can’t metabolize! Fruits? Have inferior nutrient density relative to vegetables!)
Thoughts on wheaty things: you can probably dismiss the paleosphere arguments against wheat. You’re still dealing with a plant that doesn’t want to be eaten and therefore contains toxic chemicals, but unlike other plants (e.g. broccolli), wheat doesn’t come with killer micronutrient density. The naive approach would be to displace as many wheat-calories with vegetable/fruit/meat/nut/anything-else-with-higher-micronutrient-density calories. However, I also get the need for cheap calories, so if you’re already eating all the micronutrients you need to, I can’t really argue too hard against wheat.
Meat: near as I can tell, the important distinction is “processed/not processed” (see top comment thread in Lifestyle Interventions to Increase Longevity). There’s also good reasons to prefer lean: better nutrient density, fewer toxins (which often are fat-soluble), although we again run into “more cost per calorie.”
Caffeine: have you considered/tried not doing caffeine? I’m biased against it, since I don’t really get the stimulant benefits but do suffer from withdrawal symptoms, but if you’re a normal human, you’re going to build tolerance, and suddenly your coffee-to-improve-performance-beyond-baseline has turned into coffee-to-keep-performance-at-baseline and it costs more than water. Also, chocolate contains caffeine and theobromine (another minor stimulant); consider restricting your chocolate consumption for days you need a performance boost and cut the coffee entirely.
I’ll recommend Food and Western Disease as a book on nutrition that reads a bit like Gwern (1, 2) and lends itself to being updated upon (the book concludes with a recommendation for a version of paleo (which is almost closer to what you have here than what you’d find on, say, Mark’s Daily Apple, but I used the same principles to arrive at eating soylent exclusively, and I’m confident that it could improve your nutrition plan significantly.)
I’m curious as to how it arrives at a version of paleo while simultaneously dismissing the paleosphere on wheat (of which Scott has listed only a few)?
Because if I could distill the object-level advice of the paleosphere into two words, they would be: “avoid wheat”.
(Obviously, standard diet advice doesn’t apply when one is hypoglycemic, although I suppose, depending on the underlying causes of the hypoglycemia, the prescription could be more carbohydrates or more fat)
Seeds (read: grains) have the highest concentration of “don’t eat me” toxins, because of the role they play in reproduction; phytic acid, for instance, inhibits absorption of several minerals.
Humans can live off vegetables and some fish (Kitavans) or almost entirely meat (Inuit) and be pretty healthy. However, even animals optimized for eating seeds, much less humans, cannot live off grains exclusively without developing pellegra and beriberi.
Cereals have exceptionally high energy density, which may lead to overfeeding.
It’s plausible grains interfere with satiety responses via endocrine disruption
Grains have a bad omega-3 : omega-6 ratio.
Grains have poor nutrient density.
Distilling Lindeberg’s object-level advice: eat lean meat, fish, vegetables (including root vegetables), fruit, and nuts (but not too many). Do not eat grains, dairy, sugar, beans, or processed things. Drink water. I’ve written about how he comes to this (and my reservations about the lack of extant evidence to support any strong recommendations, including his) previously.
Oh, I think I either misunderstoody your post or phrased my question poorly.
Your description of Lindeberg is precisely representative of the mainstream paleo “party line” as I understand it. I thought the book would “dismiss the paleosphere arguments against wheat”, as you suggested, and give justifications for why it was okay while still maintaining paleo—but what you’ve written is the paleosphere argument against wheat (which is a grain)
Huh. From the time I spent in the paleosphere, the arguments I saw against wheat were the six Scott listed plus “carbs are evil!” (Literally the only input to the delta-weight function is grams_carbs.) Lindeberg either ignores or dismisses these arguments. I stopped spending time in the paleosphere a while back and I’m not overwhelmingly proud of the epistemic purity of the parts I did frequent, so maybe you just got to see the paleosphere make their non-wretched arguments.
Ooh okay. So they both don’t like wheat, but for different reasons. I had misunderstood your original statement to meant that Lindeberg would exonerate wheat. My mistake.
tldr!Lindeberg does seems to disagree with Scott about the endocrine disruption thing—unless it’s just leptin-lectin specifically we’re talking about here, and give the “toxins” idea a bit more weight than Scott does.
I stopped spending time in the paleosphere a while back and I’m not overwhelmingly proud of the epistemic purity of the parts I did frequent, so maybe you just got to see the paleosphere make their non-wretched arguments.
Yeah, amateur nutrition is chock full of quacks, and I think nutrition should be approached with almost as much skepticism as politics (which is a shame, since one’s feeding behavior is actually important).
FWIW, I’ve actually heard both the arguments that Lindenberg listed and the arguments that Scott rebutted in the paleosphere...I whole heartedly agree with Lindenberg, but I don’t particularly trust Scott’s judgement in this matter (despite otherwise thinking extremely extremely highly of him) because he’s making interpretations I wouldn’t make.
For example
Something seems to be going on with autism and schizophrenia – but most people don’t have autism or schizophrenia. The intestinal barrier seems to become more permeable with possible implications for autoimmune diseases – but most people don’t have autoimmune disease.
is just...such a weird thing for a psychiatrist to say. From my perspective Intestinal barrier problems leading to generalized inflammation and generalized mental deficiency are something to seriously worry about, especially when ADHD and depression are also linked to inflammation. From my perspective, this clearly pointing to an auto-immune-mediated deficit in general brain health, with an elevated risk of all mental problems in general. You can say that the effect is not real, but once you accept that it’s real you can’t say “oh but I’m not schizophrenic so it does not apply”, as if schizophrenic brains were so fundamentally different from healthy brains that it shouldn’t give a healthy person pause when a particular food worsens schizophrenia.
And to me,
But what none of these studies are going to do a good job ruling out is that whole grain is just funging against refined grain which is even worse.
is a big, gaping, chasming hole that Scott is treating as a minor breach. (I mean, forget refined grains, it could be funging against coke and cheetos for all we know). It’s interesting that we can look at the same data and see it so differently.
Swapped quick for fast. Thanks for pointing that out!
On whey protein—I was exposed to a lot of unverified health information by an ex. Much of that information came from a group of sources that take a conspiracy-theory approach to nutrition research (there’s a big food industry that controls what gets published, and a lack of evidence for or any evidence against fact X is because of the food industry!). This is not to say that the facts I was exposed to were wrong, but rather that I need to verify them. So according to her, whey protein was bad. A quick google search for “whey protein health concerns” turns up quite a bit, although it’s a mishmash of stuff. The mayo clinic has a list of side effects from using whey protein, and this article states that “increased whey protein added to the diet of rats increased tumors and cancers”. On the other hand, wikipedia mentions the potential value of whey protein in reducing risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. So the picture looks far from clear—I guess I have some more reading to do (unless someone else has already done the reading and can whey in?).
Thanks for the link on wheat stuff—because of the hypoglycemia, wheat has been a major building block of my meals. It’s nice to know that I can continue that. Same goes for your suggestions on meat—most of my meat intake is chicken breasts, which fit in the non-processed lean meat category.
I really should try weaning myself off caffeine, and see how I feel. I was 20 before I started drinking it, and I was able to perform in school and work settings just fine without. That said, I’d like to do some more reading about how caffeine actually works—do you have another link to suggest? (if nothing comes to mind, I’ll just spend some time with google).
Added Food and Western Disease to my reading list. Thanks!
Caffeine’s an adenosine antagonist. Now, let’s figure out what that means.
Neurons have proteins embedded in their membranes called receptors. Chemicals (e.g. neurotransmitters) can bind to these receptors, which causes stuff to happen. For instance, adenosine is a chemical, and it can bind to receptors in your brain cells, resulting in sleepy behavior.
(Here seems to be the place to mention that this is a vastly oversimplified explanation. Those interested in a technical explanation would do well to check out the appropriate textbook, because I literally just condensed over three chapters of my psychopharmacology textbook in as many sentences.)
Caffeine is an antagonist. Antagonists are able to bind to receptors without causing the stuff to happen. Since the receptors are already bound, the adenosine can’t bind to them, meaning the stuff (in this case, sleepy behavior) happens less.
This leads nicely into tolerance. Your body reacts to not-enough-working-adenosine-receptors by adding adenosine receptors. Thus, when your not hopped up on caffeine, you have too many adenosine receptors (and therefore too much sleepy behavior), and even when you are on caffeine, the effects are muted.
Fortunately, it’s pretty straightforward to reduce the number of adenosine receptors: you just stop ingesting caffeine, your body notices there’s too many adenosine receptors, and removes them. This doesn’t happen immediately, so you get withdrawal. Checking wikipedia, this should last 2–9 days at nuisance level. (Relative to the other drugs in my textbook, this is positively innocuous).
Also, it’s worth mentioning caffeine’s pharmacokinetics. The rate at which caffeine is metabolized is proportional to how much is in your system. Solving the differential equation gives you something like $A e^{-kt}$; the important thing to know is it has a half-life of about 6 hours.
Out of every course I took in college, psychopharmacology had by far the highest [actual IRL use] : [expected IRL use] ratio. Drugs are ubiquitous and having a solid understanding constantly pays small dividends.
Is there any research on why caffeine seems to affect some people more/differently than others? Anecdotally, I’ve noticed over the years that I get the “jitters” after two cups and have to stop because I can’t stand the feeling, whereas others can drink half a pot and barely notice the effects.
I initially thought that these others had just ‘pushed through the jitters’ and built up a tolerance, but some of them have told me they’ve never experienced the jittery feeling I’m talking about. Or maybe it just didn’t make them as uncomfortable as it makes me?
The answer, as with most questions like ‘why does X seem to work well for some people and not others’ is going to be complex. For example, one of the recent links in my newsletter touches on this topic:
Aside from finding some hits, caffeine consumption has long had meaningful heritability estimates (some are cited in that paper, others can be found in Google Scholar with the obvious query ‘caffeine heritability’). So that seems to be part of it: genetics.
Thanks for the paper (that’s a lot of authors!). The complexity you mention makes it difficult to determine whether substance X (caffeine, alcohol, eggs, etc.) has a net positive or negative for any given person when it comes to health benefits. Coffee has been linked to some positive health effects, but maybe only for those people who don’t get the jitters....that’s the sort of thing that would be cool to know. Until then, I’m just going to listen to my body and minimize consumption.
You might want to say something like “quick” instead of “fast” because homonyms (I first thought you were going to talk about intermittent fasting, which didn’t make sense because of the hypoglycemia).
Why are you skeptical of whey protein? I’ve only ever heard good stuff, and I’ve spent enough time reading about nutrition to construct not-unreasonable arguments against almost every food. (Vegetables? Plants don’t want to be eaten (except for fruit), so they contain bad-to-eat chemicals that humans almost certainly can’t metabolize! Fruits? Have inferior nutrient density relative to vegetables!)
Thoughts on wheaty things: you can probably dismiss the paleosphere arguments against wheat. You’re still dealing with a plant that doesn’t want to be eaten and therefore contains toxic chemicals, but unlike other plants (e.g. broccolli), wheat doesn’t come with killer micronutrient density. The naive approach would be to displace as many wheat-calories with vegetable/fruit/meat/nut/anything-else-with-higher-micronutrient-density calories. However, I also get the need for cheap calories, so if you’re already eating all the micronutrients you need to, I can’t really argue too hard against wheat.
Meat: near as I can tell, the important distinction is “processed/not processed” (see top comment thread in Lifestyle Interventions to Increase Longevity). There’s also good reasons to prefer lean: better nutrient density, fewer toxins (which often are fat-soluble), although we again run into “more cost per calorie.”
Caffeine: have you considered/tried not doing caffeine? I’m biased against it, since I don’t really get the stimulant benefits but do suffer from withdrawal symptoms, but if you’re a normal human, you’re going to build tolerance, and suddenly your coffee-to-improve-performance-beyond-baseline has turned into coffee-to-keep-performance-at-baseline and it costs more than water. Also, chocolate contains caffeine and theobromine (another minor stimulant); consider restricting your chocolate consumption for days you need a performance boost and cut the coffee entirely.
I’ll recommend Food and Western Disease as a book on nutrition that reads a bit like Gwern (1, 2) and lends itself to being updated upon (the book concludes with a recommendation for a version of paleo (which is almost closer to what you have here than what you’d find on, say, Mark’s Daily Apple, but I used the same principles to arrive at eating soylent exclusively, and I’m confident that it could improve your nutrition plan significantly.)
I’m curious as to how it arrives at a version of paleo while simultaneously dismissing the paleosphere on wheat (of which Scott has listed only a few)?
Because if I could distill the object-level advice of the paleosphere into two words, they would be: “avoid wheat”.
(Obviously, standard diet advice doesn’t apply when one is hypoglycemic, although I suppose, depending on the underlying causes of the hypoglycemia, the prescription could be more carbohydrates or more fat)
To tl;dr a tl;dr
Seeds (read: grains) have the highest concentration of “don’t eat me” toxins, because of the role they play in reproduction; phytic acid, for instance, inhibits absorption of several minerals.
Humans can live off vegetables and some fish (Kitavans) or almost entirely meat (Inuit) and be pretty healthy. However, even animals optimized for eating seeds, much less humans, cannot live off grains exclusively without developing pellegra and beriberi.
Cereals have exceptionally high energy density, which may lead to overfeeding.
It’s plausible grains interfere with satiety responses via endocrine disruption
Grains have a bad omega-3 : omega-6 ratio.
Grains have poor nutrient density.
Distilling Lindeberg’s object-level advice: eat lean meat, fish, vegetables (including root vegetables), fruit, and nuts (but not too many). Do not eat grains, dairy, sugar, beans, or processed things. Drink water. I’ve written about how he comes to this (and my reservations about the lack of extant evidence to support any strong recommendations, including his) previously.
You shouldn’t care much about omega-3/6 ratio in grains because they don’t usually have much of either. Same for meat.
Oh, I think I either misunderstoody your post or phrased my question poorly.
Your description of Lindeberg is precisely representative of the mainstream paleo “party line” as I understand it. I thought the book would “dismiss the paleosphere arguments against wheat”, as you suggested, and give justifications for why it was okay while still maintaining paleo—but what you’ve written is the paleosphere argument against wheat (which is a grain)
Huh. From the time I spent in the paleosphere, the arguments I saw against wheat were the six Scott listed plus “carbs are evil!” (Literally the only input to the delta-weight function is grams_carbs.) Lindeberg either ignores or dismisses these arguments. I stopped spending time in the paleosphere a while back and I’m not overwhelmingly proud of the epistemic purity of the parts I did frequent, so maybe you just got to see the paleosphere make their non-wretched arguments.
Ooh okay. So they both don’t like wheat, but for different reasons. I had misunderstood your original statement to meant that Lindeberg would exonerate wheat. My mistake.
tldr!Lindeberg does seems to disagree with Scott about the endocrine disruption thing—unless it’s just leptin-lectin specifically we’re talking about here, and give the “toxins” idea a bit more weight than Scott does.
Yeah, amateur nutrition is chock full of quacks, and I think nutrition should be approached with almost as much skepticism as politics (which is a shame, since one’s feeding behavior is actually important).
FWIW, I’ve actually heard both the arguments that Lindenberg listed and the arguments that Scott rebutted in the paleosphere...I whole heartedly agree with Lindenberg, but I don’t particularly trust Scott’s judgement in this matter (despite otherwise thinking extremely extremely highly of him) because he’s making interpretations I wouldn’t make.
For example
is just...such a weird thing for a psychiatrist to say. From my perspective Intestinal barrier problems leading to generalized inflammation and generalized mental deficiency are something to seriously worry about, especially when ADHD and depression are also linked to inflammation. From my perspective, this clearly pointing to an auto-immune-mediated deficit in general brain health, with an elevated risk of all mental problems in general. You can say that the effect is not real, but once you accept that it’s real you can’t say “oh but I’m not schizophrenic so it does not apply”, as if schizophrenic brains were so fundamentally different from healthy brains that it shouldn’t give a healthy person pause when a particular food worsens schizophrenia.
And to me,
is a big, gaping, chasming hole that Scott is treating as a minor breach. (I mean, forget refined grains, it could be funging against coke and cheetos for all we know). It’s interesting that we can look at the same data and see it so differently.
Swapped quick for fast. Thanks for pointing that out!
On whey protein—I was exposed to a lot of unverified health information by an ex. Much of that information came from a group of sources that take a conspiracy-theory approach to nutrition research (there’s a big food industry that controls what gets published, and a lack of evidence for or any evidence against fact X is because of the food industry!). This is not to say that the facts I was exposed to were wrong, but rather that I need to verify them. So according to her, whey protein was bad. A quick google search for “whey protein health concerns” turns up quite a bit, although it’s a mishmash of stuff. The mayo clinic has a list of side effects from using whey protein, and this article states that “increased whey protein added to the diet of rats increased tumors and cancers”. On the other hand, wikipedia mentions the potential value of whey protein in reducing risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. So the picture looks far from clear—I guess I have some more reading to do (unless someone else has already done the reading and can whey in?).
Thanks for the link on wheat stuff—because of the hypoglycemia, wheat has been a major building block of my meals. It’s nice to know that I can continue that. Same goes for your suggestions on meat—most of my meat intake is chicken breasts, which fit in the non-processed lean meat category.
I really should try weaning myself off caffeine, and see how I feel. I was 20 before I started drinking it, and I was able to perform in school and work settings just fine without. That said, I’d like to do some more reading about how caffeine actually works—do you have another link to suggest? (if nothing comes to mind, I’ll just spend some time with google).
Added Food and Western Disease to my reading list. Thanks!
Let’s talk about drugs!
Caffeine’s an adenosine antagonist. Now, let’s figure out what that means.
Neurons have proteins embedded in their membranes called receptors. Chemicals (e.g. neurotransmitters) can bind to these receptors, which causes stuff to happen. For instance, adenosine is a chemical, and it can bind to receptors in your brain cells, resulting in sleepy behavior.
(Here seems to be the place to mention that this is a vastly oversimplified explanation. Those interested in a technical explanation would do well to check out the appropriate textbook, because I literally just condensed over three chapters of my psychopharmacology textbook in as many sentences.)
Caffeine is an antagonist. Antagonists are able to bind to receptors without causing the stuff to happen. Since the receptors are already bound, the adenosine can’t bind to them, meaning the stuff (in this case, sleepy behavior) happens less.
This leads nicely into tolerance. Your body reacts to not-enough-working-adenosine-receptors by adding adenosine receptors. Thus, when your not hopped up on caffeine, you have too many adenosine receptors (and therefore too much sleepy behavior), and even when you are on caffeine, the effects are muted.
Fortunately, it’s pretty straightforward to reduce the number of adenosine receptors: you just stop ingesting caffeine, your body notices there’s too many adenosine receptors, and removes them. This doesn’t happen immediately, so you get withdrawal. Checking wikipedia, this should last 2–9 days at nuisance level. (Relative to the other drugs in my textbook, this is positively innocuous).
Also, it’s worth mentioning caffeine’s pharmacokinetics. The rate at which caffeine is metabolized is proportional to how much is in your system. Solving the differential equation gives you something like $A e^{-kt}$; the important thing to know is it has a half-life of about 6 hours.
Out of every course I took in college, psychopharmacology had by far the highest [actual IRL use] : [expected IRL use] ratio. Drugs are ubiquitous and having a solid understanding constantly pays small dividends.
Is there any research on why caffeine seems to affect some people more/differently than others? Anecdotally, I’ve noticed over the years that I get the “jitters” after two cups and have to stop because I can’t stand the feeling, whereas others can drink half a pot and barely notice the effects.
I initially thought that these others had just ‘pushed through the jitters’ and built up a tolerance, but some of them have told me they’ve never experienced the jittery feeling I’m talking about. Or maybe it just didn’t make them as uncomfortable as it makes me?
The answer, as with most questions like ‘why does X seem to work well for some people and not others’ is going to be complex. For example, one of the recent links in my newsletter touches on this topic:
“Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies six novel loci associated with habitual coffee consumption”, The Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium et al 2014 (excerpts)
Aside from finding some hits, caffeine consumption has long had meaningful heritability estimates (some are cited in that paper, others can be found in Google Scholar with the obvious query ‘caffeine heritability’). So that seems to be part of it: genetics.
Thanks for the paper (that’s a lot of authors!). The complexity you mention makes it difficult to determine whether substance X (caffeine, alcohol, eggs, etc.) has a net positive or negative for any given person when it comes to health benefits. Coffee has been linked to some positive health effects, but maybe only for those people who don’t get the jitters....that’s the sort of thing that would be cool to know. Until then, I’m just going to listen to my body and minimize consumption.
Fantastic explanation, and now I have another book to read eventually. Thanks!