I agree that they would be if the diet was carefully followed, but I wonder about how well people practicing the paleolithic diet actually approximate it.
Yes of course this is true, it can be difficult to follow. I believe in it in theory, but in practice is a whole other matter.
My biggest wonder is whether people work hard enough to eat only wild and grass-fed meats, which is necessary to balance out the omega fatty acid profile; otherwise meat is still bad for that.
Yes, although vegetable oils and fried foods can be just as bad. I take fish oil supplements to help at least.
bread is more sugarey than table sugar
Please stop repeating this popular myth. Glucose is a sugar, and starch is glucose, but that’s very misleading.
I meant ‘sugarey’ in terms of the principle pure metabolic form of sugar, which is glucose. This is not a myth—starch converts so easily into glucose that you should think of it as glucose. Glucose is pure true sugar as far as your body is concerned. Thus starch is more pure ‘sugarey’ than table sugar. Ask a diabetic about the insulin response of starch.
You are discussing additional reasons why fructose is potentially even worse than starch/glucose.
Large glucose spikes are not “just fine for you” in the long term. There is significant mounting evidence that these large insulin spikes are a novel feature of our diet that we have not had adequate time to fully adapt for. In the long term it contributes to weight gain and the metabolic syndrome set of diseases.
Naturally we have varying degrees of genetic resistance, but a reduced insulin load is just plain healthier for everyone. This is no myth.
A key feature of the paleo-diet is low overall caloric density, low glucose, and low insulin load.
I realize that cooked food has been around for a long time, but probably not long enough to induce significant evolutionary adaptations.
I dont know about this. Some humans have significant evolutionary adaptations for grains and milk already. Cooking has been around for much longer, and we can expect significant adaptations for that. Indeed, if anything we have probably lost much of the robustness of our gut defenses as a result, but gained adaptations against potential ill-effects of cooking (carcinogens?)
Glucose does not evoke a metabolic response identical to fructose. Perhaps most importantly, glucose can be metabolized by all cells in the body, but fructose specifically stresses the liver. Quantitatively, fructose also causes much higher triglyceride and aldehyde production than an equivalent amount of glucose, and participates in glycogenesis much less efficiently; since glycogenesis is the strongest negative-feedback mechanism for dealing with excessive insulin, this ought to be a significant difference.
This is not to say that insulin spikes or high blood-glucose levels are healthful, but they can be regulated without eliminating carbohydrates from our diets. “Glucose is pure true sugar” as far as chemists are concerned, perhaps, but our body treats different sugars quite differently, and it is dangerous to conflate them.
I never disagreed with your point that fructose is worse than glucose. I haven’t investigated it much, but I find it reasonable. I was merely pointing out that starch converts to mass glucose and mass glucose itself is not healthy. Not healthy at all.
Insulin spikes is one issue, but total insulin load itself is another. In theory you can control insulin spikes by eating a large number of smaller snacks, but in practice this is difficult for a variety of reasons—including not having any direct control over the rate of one’s stomach emptying. As a diabetic could tell you (my brother is type 1), minimizing starch is crucial for reducing total insulin load.
We think of aging as measured by the passage of time, but the body does not measure time according to atomic clocks or rotations of the earth. Time in the body is measured in terms of biological processes.
Your heart’s age is not measured in terms of seconds or minutes but in beats.
Your skin’s age is measured largely in number of sun exposures and total sheddings.
In general the aging of most systems in the body can be measured in number of cellular reproductions and major metabolic cycles.
We know that general lifespan is measured more in total calories than absolute time. Total insulin response is perhaps an even more accurate measure, and at the very least it measures the differential aging of the metabolism of sugar regulation and energy storage in particular.
Reducing or eliminating starch is up there as one of the more important health improvements one can make. It helps reduce total calorie load, shift to a more ideal weight, and places less strain on your pancreas. High fiber carbohydrates are a different manner—but mostly what people mean by carbohydrates is typically starch.
We know that general lifespan is measured more in total calories than absolute time
So staying sedentary, while not overeating, should result in about a two-fold life-expectancy increase over an athlete that consumes about twice as many calories daily? Abstractly, that makes sense, but empirically we know that the truth is close to the opposite.
From what i remember about caloric restriction research, current empirical data does support the abstract theory, but I did not mean to imply some exact linear relation. From what I remember, exercise has health benefits but nothing near the scale of longevity increase you get from caloric restriction.
My impression is that caloric restriction has a threshold effect—there’s a mechanism that gets invoked when the calories are low enough, though it isn’t a sharp boundary. Is this at all accurate?
This matches what I’ve read—that the body switches into different metabolic modes based on caloric abundance. Entire patterns of gene expression change.
Today we spend almost all of our time in the caloric-abundance high burn mode, and this accelerates metabolic aging.
However, I’m also thinking that caloric burn accelerates some aging processes by itself, but it is quite difficult to dissociate that from everything else—insulin, gene expression, etc etc
Person A = sedentary 60 kg female, eats 1500 kcal/day (which is not calorie restriction, but fairly reasonable for that body weight and activity level)
Person B = 60 kg female marathoner, eats 3000 kcal/day (high, but certainly possible)
Let’s further assume that their diets are compositionally the same, so that B eats the same things as A in the same quantities, just twice as often.
Life expectancy difference? My money is on B to live longer. Yours?
some quick google searching on “athlete lifespan” looks to support my bet:
from this site concerning elite athletes more likely to fit that 2x caloric profile:
What is the life expectancy of world class athletes?
Not so good. The average elite athlete will die by the age of 67. That is considerably lower then the 76 year life expectancy of the average American. Do you want to hear something that is really scary? According to the NFL Players Association, the average life expectancy of an NFL player is 58 years of age.
I can’t really think of a study that would isolate for all the factors, but overall from what i’ve seen exercise is only healthy in moderate amounts, and taken to athletic levels the benefit is overshadowed by the higher caloric entropy.
Remember that heat is chaos, and we measure car lifetimes partly in mileage—so total entropy is a reasonable measure.
I suspect that a lot of the difference is accounted for by injuries, both major and minor. Football players, in particular, take a whole lot of abuse. A regular person exercising carefully at the gym won’t have that problem.
Perhaps, but death from such injuries is extremely rare. I doubt it is any significant contributor to their death rate.
Burning off the calories through exercise is certainly more healthy than getting fat, but from what i’ve seen caloric intake is negatively correlated with lifespan in general.
That’s a good point and could explain why footballers have a lifespan 5 years or so lower than high end athletes and much lower than the general population.
It would be interesting to compare boxers/fighters based on weight class. They take alot of head beating and you can compare for different caloric intakes.
Sumo wrestlers would be another interesting data point—very high caloric intake and no concussions.
I suspect that one would find a significant caloric effect independent of concussions. Most footballers are quite big and have very high caloric intakes.
I’d expect QB’s to live longer than typical linemen.
I cheated a little by mentioning that person B was a runner; I’ve seen those statistics, and they mysteriously don’t apply to runners. Likewise, footballers (both gridiron and the real kind) have very high rates of arthritis, but runners do not. It seems to be a difference between what we were evolved to do and what we can do. Analogous to this discussion? Very likely :-)
One not-so-mysterious difference is muscle mass; long-distance runners don’t develop much, whereas many other athletes do. Muscle is even harder to pump blood through than fat, so an extra 20kg of muscle is harder on the heart than 20kg of fat, which is sometimes cited as the reason that body builders so often have serious cardiac health problems (other reasons include large amounts of protein and cholesterol consumed, but I suspect you don’t buy those explanations).
EDIT: I shouldn’t stress my claim so much. I posted quickly because I’m busy with other things, but post-posting Googling seems to disagree with what I said; I haven’t actually found anything I trust yet, but it does seem that moving from long-distance running to ultra-long-distance running may move athletes back into a risk category.
As a diabetic could tell you (my brother is type 1), minimizing starch is crucial for reducing total insulin load.
Wait, what? As a diabetic I avoid starch (somewhat) to reduce blood glucose variability, but I’d never heard of “insulin load”, and searching PubMed and Google for that phrase didn’t turn up anything interesting. Starch only causes blood glucose variability if it’s digested too quickly, as measured by glycemic index, which happens with things like breadcrumbs but not with things like bread. My understanding of the issue is that insulin matters only insofar as it interacts with blood glucose, glucagon and liver storage. If insulin had any direct bad effects, I would consider this surprising, and a big deal.
By insulin load i just mean total insulin. You diabetics know exactly how much you use in a given day, but regular people produce similar amounts automatically. The idea is that in the modern diet we consume too many calories mainly from energy dense foods such as carbohydrates which cause more insulin spikes and overwork the pancreas, eventually leading to destabilization and metabolic syndrome (type 2 diabetes and associated diseases). We haven’t had enough time to optimize for these conditions.
There’s also some recent evidence / claims that cooking (and meat eating) were in part responsible for the big jump in human brain size and intelligence.
That is interesting. I was aware that cooking opened up a whole new world of plant foods to us—most of our neolithic vegetable staples are indegistable or even poisonous until cooked. I was not aware that cooking significantly increases meat digestability. Although raw meats still seem much more digestable than raw neolithic staples. You can’t eat raw grains or potatoes, for example.
Regardless of what other selection pressures may have been driving us towards larger brains, it’s clear that hunting and cooking provided the resource advantage to support the quick increase. I imagine that the growth in complexity of language, culture and technology drove the selection effect.
It’s interesting though that our hominid brains rapidly expanded up to about 100-200 billion neurons (the latter only in our larger brained neandrathal cousins) and then stopped. This is about the same upper neuron count we see in elephants and cetaceans.
Yes of course this is true, it can be difficult to follow. I believe in it in theory, but in practice is a whole other matter.
Yes, although vegetable oils and fried foods can be just as bad. I take fish oil supplements to help at least.
I meant ‘sugarey’ in terms of the principle pure metabolic form of sugar, which is glucose. This is not a myth—starch converts so easily into glucose that you should think of it as glucose. Glucose is pure true sugar as far as your body is concerned. Thus starch is more pure ‘sugarey’ than table sugar. Ask a diabetic about the insulin response of starch.
You are discussing additional reasons why fructose is potentially even worse than starch/glucose.
Large glucose spikes are not “just fine for you” in the long term. There is significant mounting evidence that these large insulin spikes are a novel feature of our diet that we have not had adequate time to fully adapt for. In the long term it contributes to weight gain and the metabolic syndrome set of diseases.
Naturally we have varying degrees of genetic resistance, but a reduced insulin load is just plain healthier for everyone. This is no myth.
A key feature of the paleo-diet is low overall caloric density, low glucose, and low insulin load.
I dont know about this. Some humans have significant evolutionary adaptations for grains and milk already. Cooking has been around for much longer, and we can expect significant adaptations for that. Indeed, if anything we have probably lost much of the robustness of our gut defenses as a result, but gained adaptations against potential ill-effects of cooking (carcinogens?)
Glucose does not evoke a metabolic response identical to fructose. Perhaps most importantly, glucose can be metabolized by all cells in the body, but fructose specifically stresses the liver. Quantitatively, fructose also causes much higher triglyceride and aldehyde production than an equivalent amount of glucose, and participates in glycogenesis much less efficiently; since glycogenesis is the strongest negative-feedback mechanism for dealing with excessive insulin, this ought to be a significant difference.
This is not to say that insulin spikes or high blood-glucose levels are healthful, but they can be regulated without eliminating carbohydrates from our diets. “Glucose is pure true sugar” as far as chemists are concerned, perhaps, but our body treats different sugars quite differently, and it is dangerous to conflate them.
I never disagreed with your point that fructose is worse than glucose. I haven’t investigated it much, but I find it reasonable. I was merely pointing out that starch converts to mass glucose and mass glucose itself is not healthy. Not healthy at all.
Insulin spikes is one issue, but total insulin load itself is another. In theory you can control insulin spikes by eating a large number of smaller snacks, but in practice this is difficult for a variety of reasons—including not having any direct control over the rate of one’s stomach emptying. As a diabetic could tell you (my brother is type 1), minimizing starch is crucial for reducing total insulin load.
We think of aging as measured by the passage of time, but the body does not measure time according to atomic clocks or rotations of the earth. Time in the body is measured in terms of biological processes.
Your heart’s age is not measured in terms of seconds or minutes but in beats.
Your skin’s age is measured largely in number of sun exposures and total sheddings.
In general the aging of most systems in the body can be measured in number of cellular reproductions and major metabolic cycles.
We know that general lifespan is measured more in total calories than absolute time. Total insulin response is perhaps an even more accurate measure, and at the very least it measures the differential aging of the metabolism of sugar regulation and energy storage in particular.
Reducing or eliminating starch is up there as one of the more important health improvements one can make. It helps reduce total calorie load, shift to a more ideal weight, and places less strain on your pancreas. High fiber carbohydrates are a different manner—but mostly what people mean by carbohydrates is typically starch.
So staying sedentary, while not overeating, should result in about a two-fold life-expectancy increase over an athlete that consumes about twice as many calories daily? Abstractly, that makes sense, but empirically we know that the truth is close to the opposite.
From what i remember about caloric restriction research, current empirical data does support the abstract theory, but I did not mean to imply some exact linear relation. From what I remember, exercise has health benefits but nothing near the scale of longevity increase you get from caloric restriction.
My impression is that caloric restriction has a threshold effect—there’s a mechanism that gets invoked when the calories are low enough, though it isn’t a sharp boundary. Is this at all accurate?
This matches what I’ve read—that the body switches into different metabolic modes based on caloric abundance. Entire patterns of gene expression change.
Today we spend almost all of our time in the caloric-abundance high burn mode, and this accelerates metabolic aging.
However, I’m also thinking that caloric burn accelerates some aging processes by itself, but it is quite difficult to dissociate that from everything else—insulin, gene expression, etc etc
Would you accept a sub-linear correlation?
Person A = sedentary 60 kg female, eats 1500 kcal/day (which is not calorie restriction, but fairly reasonable for that body weight and activity level)
Person B = 60 kg female marathoner, eats 3000 kcal/day (high, but certainly possible)
Let’s further assume that their diets are compositionally the same, so that B eats the same things as A in the same quantities, just twice as often.
Life expectancy difference? My money is on B to live longer. Yours?
some quick google searching on “athlete lifespan” looks to support my bet:
from this site concerning elite athletes more likely to fit that 2x caloric profile:
similar results for athletes in general
I can’t really think of a study that would isolate for all the factors, but overall from what i’ve seen exercise is only healthy in moderate amounts, and taken to athletic levels the benefit is overshadowed by the higher caloric entropy.
Remember that heat is chaos, and we measure car lifetimes partly in mileage—so total entropy is a reasonable measure.
I suspect that a lot of the difference is accounted for by injuries, both major and minor. Football players, in particular, take a whole lot of abuse. A regular person exercising carefully at the gym won’t have that problem.
Perhaps, but death from such injuries is extremely rare. I doubt it is any significant contributor to their death rate.
Burning off the calories through exercise is certainly more healthy than getting fat, but from what i’ve seen caloric intake is negatively correlated with lifespan in general.
With footballers, there’s reason to think it’s accumulated concussions rather than death from a single injury.
That’s a good point and could explain why footballers have a lifespan 5 years or so lower than high end athletes and much lower than the general population.
It would be interesting to compare boxers/fighters based on weight class. They take alot of head beating and you can compare for different caloric intakes.
Sumo wrestlers would be another interesting data point—very high caloric intake and no concussions.
I suspect that one would find a significant caloric effect independent of concussions. Most footballers are quite big and have very high caloric intakes.
I’d expect QB’s to live longer than typical linemen.
I cheated a little by mentioning that person B was a runner; I’ve seen those statistics, and they mysteriously don’t apply to runners. Likewise, footballers (both gridiron and the real kind) have very high rates of arthritis, but runners do not. It seems to be a difference between what we were evolved to do and what we can do. Analogous to this discussion? Very likely :-)
One not-so-mysterious difference is muscle mass; long-distance runners don’t develop much, whereas many other athletes do. Muscle is even harder to pump blood through than fat, so an extra 20kg of muscle is harder on the heart than 20kg of fat, which is sometimes cited as the reason that body builders so often have serious cardiac health problems (other reasons include large amounts of protein and cholesterol consumed, but I suspect you don’t buy those explanations).
EDIT: I shouldn’t stress my claim so much. I posted quickly because I’m busy with other things, but post-posting Googling seems to disagree with what I said; I haven’t actually found anything I trust yet, but it does seem that moving from long-distance running to ultra-long-distance running may move athletes back into a risk category.
All else being equal and assuming A gets some exercise and is not fully sedentary, yes I’d bet on A.
Of course, the highest lifespan would be for caloric intake well below today’s average.
Wait, what? As a diabetic I avoid starch (somewhat) to reduce blood glucose variability, but I’d never heard of “insulin load”, and searching PubMed and Google for that phrase didn’t turn up anything interesting. Starch only causes blood glucose variability if it’s digested too quickly, as measured by glycemic index, which happens with things like breadcrumbs but not with things like bread. My understanding of the issue is that insulin matters only insofar as it interacts with blood glucose, glucagon and liver storage. If insulin had any direct bad effects, I would consider this surprising, and a big deal.
By insulin load i just mean total insulin. You diabetics know exactly how much you use in a given day, but regular people produce similar amounts automatically. The idea is that in the modern diet we consume too many calories mainly from energy dense foods such as carbohydrates which cause more insulin spikes and overwork the pancreas, eventually leading to destabilization and metabolic syndrome (type 2 diabetes and associated diseases). We haven’t had enough time to optimize for these conditions.
There’s also some recent evidence / claims that cooking (and meat eating) were in part responsible for the big jump in human brain size and intelligence.
That is interesting. I was aware that cooking opened up a whole new world of plant foods to us—most of our neolithic vegetable staples are indegistable or even poisonous until cooked. I was not aware that cooking significantly increases meat digestability. Although raw meats still seem much more digestable than raw neolithic staples. You can’t eat raw grains or potatoes, for example.
Regardless of what other selection pressures may have been driving us towards larger brains, it’s clear that hunting and cooking provided the resource advantage to support the quick increase. I imagine that the growth in complexity of language, culture and technology drove the selection effect.
It’s interesting though that our hominid brains rapidly expanded up to about 100-200 billion neurons (the latter only in our larger brained neandrathal cousins) and then stopped. This is about the same upper neuron count we see in elephants and cetaceans.