New to paleo diet...

Food groups and menu items suitable for the paleo diet should be posted here.

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CathyMe.
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New to paleo diet...

Post by CathyMe. »

Hi All,
I have been doing some major research and reading on the Paleo diet and have decided to take the plunge! I pretty much already eat foods that are on the allowable list-seafood, lean turkey, lots of eggs, veggies, no dairy etc. The only thing that I have added recently that I will now take out is GF bread. I think this has been causing my appetite to go out of control and has definitely helped me gain 10lbs., which I needed, but I don't need any more weight. I have been staying away from beef and chicken based on my MRT results but have added back in pork and bought some yummy turkey bacon yesterday, which I haven't had in years. I am in contact with a dietician/nutrionist that works with Robb Wolf and am hoping she can help me set up a meal plan that works for me! I'm excited. Continuing to experience normans and have stopped taking the Lialda that I was on. Since switching my diet over the past 2 days, I have had ALOT more BM, but they are all formed so I'm guessing thats due to a change in my diet?? Anyone else experience this?
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tex
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Post by tex »

Hi Cathy,

Well, it looks as though all the cave dwellers are out hunting and gathering, somewhere, so I'll take a stab at your question.

In general, there shouldn't be any reason why you should have an increased number of BMs on the paleo diet, but I suppose it's possible if you are eating a lot more vegetables or fruit, or something else that adds more bulk. Diet changes can definitely change bowel patterns.

I'm guessing that one reason why you didn't get any responses from those on the diet may be because they haven't had that experience, but I certainly don't know that for a fact. :shrug:

Tex
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It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
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Post by CathyMe. »

Thanks Tex! I wondered if the increase in meat was the reason for it. While I have been eating a ton of seafood and fish, I was staying away from turkey bacon, and other meats but have added these in the past week.
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Post by tex »

I'm no nutritionist, but I believe that meat is low fiber, and it's about as close to a perfect food as one can come, since it contains all the essential amino acids, so theoretically at least, meat should be a low residue food.

I'm not sure if meat with increased fat levels could cause that effect or not. When I was a kid, we processed our own meat, and when we would butcher a hog (usually a couple of them while we were set up), someone always had the job of rendering the lard. The "cracklings" that were left after the pork belly was boiled to extract all the lard, were extremely tasty (but also full of fat), and when we were kids, we would pig out on them. The result was D, of course, but that's certainly not what you are referring to. Of course, you aren't eating almost pure lard, the way we were doing, so maybe there's an intermediate level with just an increased number of BMs. :shrug:

Tex
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It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
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Post by JFR »

I do best when I eat primarily meat. It does not have the effect on me that you are talking about. I do not eat low fat meats either. Meat and broth is my go to diet when things get bad. I have been paleo for most of a decade but I eat only small amounts of fruit (berries) and vegetables (greens). If I increase either of them I get into trouble.

Jean
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Post by d'libarian »

I'm new here and don't know much yet. Like you, I'm researching and reading like mad (the librarian's version of Rest&Relaxation) and came across this "hot off the press" article which you might find interesting:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 22140/full

or a layman's summary at:

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/10/2 ... eman-diet/

Sorry, I can't figure out how to make these into real links.

le
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Post by Deb »

Interestingly, I was just reading an article on digesting meat.
http://roarofwolverine.com/archives/412
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Post by tex »

High LE,

Welcome to the board. You might be interested to know that the first true internet discussion board dedicated to CC/MC (that spawned this board) was founded by a lady who was also a librarian (in Oregon, until her disease forced her to retire).

I read the abstract for which you posted a link, carefully, and I reached a totally different conclusion than the one stated in the article by Fox News. Assuming that the abstract is an accurate representation of the complete article, the "conclusions" reached in that research report appear to be little more than arbitrary claims based on smoke and mirrors. They are trying to use techniques that are incomplete, and that they admittedly don't understand, to pretend to prove scientific facts. That's preposterous, (besides being pathetically unprofessional). Apparently the authors had an agenda and the report was written to reflect that agenda regardless of the actual facts. There are far too many assumptions noted in the abstract for the conclusions to be considered to be reasonably plausible, let alone scientific fact. There are far too many concessions such as these:
In addition to being poorly quantified and understood, the trophic level effect also seems capable of quite large variation under a range of environmental conditions (temperature, altitude, aridity), as well as being potentially affected by physiological factors such as water stress, starvation and growth, digestive physiology and diet composition (for a review see McCue and Pollock,2008).
our lack of knowledge of the Δ15Ndiet-body value, and of influencing factors on this parameter, means that we cannot with confidence identify isotopic shifts resulting from small-scale dietary changes. For this, we need to quantify better the Δ15Ndiet-body in humans.
Furthermore, the research discusses the diets of "prehistoric farmers". In terms of human evolution, (and the paleo diet), neolithic diets are virtually irrelevant to the paleo diet, because by this period in time, human robustness and overall health was already declining due to the introduction of neolithic foods into the diet. None of that has anything to do with the "Caveman Diet", mentioned in the Fox News article. While it's true that many/most neolithic tribes continued to live in caves, they definitely began to shed their paleo lifestyle during the neolithic period. The bottom line is that the article is about neolithic people, not paleo people, and the diets eaten by neolithic people were vastly different from the diets of various tribes of hunter-gatherers who preceded them by the previous million years or so.

Another misconception promoted in the Fox article is that, "prehistoric people got most of their calories from lean meat or fish when modern humans would be literally poisoned by such a protein-heavy diet". In reality, the hunter gatherers ate a lot of fatty meat (whenever they could find it), and the comment that, "modern humans would be literally poisoned by such a protein-heavy diet" is pure BS. That is true only if one eats only lean meat (the result is a disease known as rabbit starvation). Vilhjalmur Stefansson proved conclusively, during the 1930s, that a 100% meat diet is not only safe, but extremely healthy (as long as it contains a sufficient amount of animal fat).

http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson2.htm

I'm guessing that the research article to which you posted a link was written to promote a vegetarian or vegan agenda. I have nothing against a vegan lifestyle, but I resent so-called "scientists" who write articles that distort the facts, in order to promote their own agendas.

As further evidence of the absurdity of the claim that, "prehistoric people got most of their calories from lean meat or fish", consider this research article where animal fat in the diet was used to treat a group of subjects who had multiple food sensitivities, and the treatment resulted in a drastic lowering of the groups average cholesterol level. The researchers concluded that:
These findings raise an interesting question: are elevated serum cholesterol levels caused in part not by eating animal fat (an extremely "old food"), but by some factor in grains, sucrose, or milk ("new foods") that interferes with cholesterol metabolism?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?db=P ... t=Abstract

That couldn't happen unless humans had evolved to eat fatty meat. But notice how this discovery has been conveniently ignored by virtually all research articles written since then.

Please don't feel that my post says anything negative about you, because I certainly am not holding you responsible for writing that article. LOL. My response is strictly in regard to the articles themselves. If there's one thing in this world that I'm passionate about, it's the benefits of the paleo diet for human health. And the paleo diet has no relation to the neolithic diet discussed in those articles, yet the authors (of both articles) have the audacity to imply that it does.

Again, welcome aboard, and please feel free to ask anything.

By the way, you don't have to worry about converting urls into live links — the system does that automatically.

Tex
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It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
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Post by d'libarian »

Tex,

Thank you for the welcome.

I recognize it is the article with which you are disagreeing, and don't take it personally. I'm amazed at your ability to read and make sense of all those statistics. Also, I did not spot the neolithic rather than paleolithic. Glad you caught that.

I skimmed the links you gave and have a couple thoughts:

Regarding the Steffansson experiment: IMHO, assuming his name indicates that he is of Scandinavian origin, does this experiment simply show that people adapted to the far north, where gardening is problematic, are well adapted to surviving on a diet of meat from animals that specialize in storing quantities of fat? It would be interesting to try the same experiment on people of temperate or equatorial descent. Of course, in our highly mobile society, our genotypes are getting well blended, and our "advancing" agriculture tinkers with what was already working, so that our poor bodies are doing the best can. Which gets to the point I've often seen in this forum: Each of us has to find what works for ourselves. The discussions give us ideas to try, not marching orders!

Regarding the cholesterol study: I wonder if those people had been on statins for several years before the study or during it. Anecdotal and personal experience suggest that statins can really mess up a person.

I appreciate so much the care and support the Potty People give to one another.

le
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Post by tex »

LE wrote:Regarding the Steffansson experiment: IMHO, assuming his name indicates that he is of Scandinavian origin, does this experiment simply show that people adapted to the far north, where gardening is problematic, are well adapted to surviving on a diet of meat from animals that specialize in storing quantities of fat? It would be interesting to try the same experiment on people of temperate or equatorial descent.
That's a very good point, because he decided to include another subject, in case any accident befell him before he concluded the trial, and his cohort was a Dane. :shock: However, in describing his reasons for his selection, he says this:
One man fortunately was available. He was Karsten Anderson, a young Dane who had been a member of my third expedition. During that time he had lived an aggregate of more than a year on strictly meat and water, suffering no ill result and, in fact being on one occasion cured by meat from scurvy which he had contracted on a mixed diet. Moreover, he knew from experience of a dozen members of the expedition that his healthful enjoyment of the diet was not peculiar to himself but common to all those who had tried it, including members of three races - ordinary whites, Cape Verde Islanders with a strain of Negro blood, and South Sea Islanders.
The red emphasis is mine, of course, but that suggests that the diet will work for any ethnic group (of course, this was not verified during this study, unfortunately).
LE wrote:Regarding the cholesterol study: I wonder if those people had been on statins for several years before the study or during it. Anecdotal and personal experience suggest that statins can really mess up a person
Another very good point. Note that the article I cited was published in January of 1988 (over 24 years ago). The first statin to be approved by the FDA (lovastatin) was approved at a 20 mg strength on August31, 1987, and it was approved at 40 mg strength on December 14, 1988. So it's not impossible that they could have been treated at a 20 mg dosage for maybe a couple of months max. However, when we consider that the study almost surely had to be concluded at least 3 or 4 months prior to the publication date in order to allow for time to write the article, and time to allow for the lag between submission of the article to the magazine, and acceptance, and the lag between acceptance and publication, it seems very unlikely that they would have had time to use the statin at all.

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/c ... BLE1=OB_Rx

Clearly, they could not have been using statins for several years, because even if they had somehow been a part of the original drug trials prior to the submission of the data that were included with the FDA application, drug trials are typically set up for a duration of 6 to 8 weeks, and this would have occurred probably a year or more prior to the approval of the drug, to allow for the report to be written up by Merck, and considered by the FDA, so any effects would have worn off long before the high fat diet trial was undertaken.

In view of the time constraints, I would guess that they never saw a statin, but of course I can't completely rule out the possibility. :shrug:
LE wrote:I appreciate so much the care and support the Potty People give to one another.
We consider ourselves to be sort of an internet family, because no one truly understands this disease unless they have it.

Welcome to the family. :grouphug:

Tex
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It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
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Post by d'libarian »

Cathy,

Sorry for taking your thread off on a bit of a tangent!

You don't mention if you have to strain to produce a BM. I always thought that C was when you couldn't produce for a day or two or more. But I recently learned that frequent small, hard BM's for which you have to strain at least 25% of the time is also C and can be a sign of food intolerance even in the absence of D. If this is what you are experiencing it may be the GF bread was doing a little bit more than making you hungry. I hope you achieve total normanship (? normanhood?) soon!

One last tangent, I got curious if some expert had done research on diet and ethnic group. There are ten gagillion hits on something called the genotype diet. lol!! The science search engines aren't near as much fun as Google.

Tex, your grasp of things and ability to access it is amazing!

le
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Post by CathyMe. »

d'liberian wrote:Cathy,

Sorry for taking your thread off on a bit of a tangent!

You don't mention if you have to strain to produce a BM. I always thought that C was when you couldn't produce for a day or two or more. But I recently learned that frequent small, hard BM's for which you have to strain at least 25% of the time is also C and can be a sign of food intolerance even in the absence of D. If this is what you are experiencing it may be the GF bread was doing a little bit more than making you hungry. I hope you achieve total normanship (? normanhood?) soon!

One last tangent, I got curious if some expert had done research on diet and ethnic group. There are ten gagillion hits on something called the genotype diet. lol!! The science search engines aren't near as much fun as Google.

Tex, your grasp of things and ability to access it is amazing!

le
Not a problem!! I love reading this stuff. I don't strain @ all and my # of BM has gone back to normal, in addition I'm continuing to experience Normans on this diet! I feel much better too after taking out the GF bread. I think I'm addicted to bread and do so much better when I just don't eat it!!!
Cathy
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