Consistency and habit
I am sorry that this blog has been quiet recently, but I've just not been finding things to post: either items that I wanted to highlight here or things that I wanted to write. I've been distracted by other things - like climbing hills in the sunshine and snow - but also I have been aware of the fact that sometimes there is not really much to say. In recent posts I've pointed to the idea that consistency and habit, patience and persistence trump most things when it comes to fitness and health. There is only so many times that you can say this before it gets boring.
Logical Fallacies
When I have been thinking about "fitness" issues I've actually been reflecting a lot on how limited my outlook has been for so long and how this might have been affecting my results. A lifetime ago - or so it seems - I did a degree in Philosophy. I did three years worth of formal logic, which was one of the parts of the course that I really enjoyed - the analysis, the equations into which arguments were broken down and expressed.
Recently I've been thinking about logical fallacies - errors in reasoning, arguments that might look valid at first but which on deeper consideration are actually invalid: the conclusion does not flow from the premises. There are lots of lists of such fallacies but Your Logical Fallacy Is... sets out a good few.
For example:
personal incredulity
Because you found something difficult to understand, or are unaware of how it works, you made out like it's probably not true.
or
the idea of an argument from silence: the absence of evidence is not the evidence or absence.....
Your exercise routine / diet is based on an invalid argument
Anyway, I suppose this gets me to some more thoughts on Paleo. The Paleo backlash is now underway with videos like this:
or Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy (interviewed here)
I actually think the best analysis was done - with a good sense of humour - by Matt Stone in
12 Paleo Myths: Eat Better Than A Caveman
Reading that and thinking through the arguments a lot I came to realise that a lot of the dogma was just wrong. In terms of the logical fallacies we were so often at:
appeal to nature
You argued that because something is 'natural' it is therefore valid, justified, inevitable, good or ideal.
The whole grok thing, spinning an ideal of how we were intended to live.....it sounds good, it sounds romantic but either there is nothing to it or else it is just banal obvious statements.
Common Sense
I was trapped in a paradigm for a while there, seeing everything through the "primal" lens. Now I am realising that I was being stupid to be so limited in outlook.
Comments
I've got a bunch of non-runners who weren't even BORN when I started running telling me I have to run barefoot because it is "natural."
That's all well and good but I've got over three decades of experience under my belt, how much do they have?
I also don't get the 'trapped in a paradigm' thing. Maybe that's because I came from Seth Roberts' world where the idea was self-experimentation and evolution helps me come up with hypotheses to test. A lot of the stuff worked. Some stuff, like the extremely low recommendations for sodium, didn't. They made an educated guess, but they were wrong- probably due in no small part to modern biases, but still it was a reasonable guess based on evolution and the available data. Zuk isn't bringing anything new to the debate, and I view her as little more than manipulative.
Dietary diversity is the key, eat fresh food, eat whole foods.
She does go off into the weeds in places:
In critiquing paleo diet thinking by comparing humans to carnivores. No one in the paleo world is saying that we are carnivores. We are omnivores.
In accenting grains as an ancient food source. Gathering and grinding grains in any quantity would have been far too labor intensive to make it a significant food source. Discovering some grain sources in plaque does not refute this.
And lastly, the common error of thinking that lean muscle meat in wild animals translates into low animal fat consumption. Our ancestors ate the entire animal which contains a much higher fat content than in the muscles meat and prized that fat.
She IS embracing a "primal" lens (Chris) while doing a good job of modernizing it by bringing to light that in a modern world indigenous food sources are uncommon, won't feed the planet and have been supplanted by modern foods which are often nutritionally richer.
"Common sense" to me says one would have a hard time going wrong eating mainly meat and plants. Those trying to justify grains, for example, are making matters a little more complicated.
I don't think any reasonable paleo person would argue against moderation or indulgences. But I will likely never be convinced a diet made up of a lot of grains is the way to go. Again, a pretty simple concept if you ask me.
Root ideas of Paleo movement can not be wrong as they are based on evolution. Paleo should not be restricted only to diet. The core of Paleo idea is, as far as I understand, to see how our ancestors have lived and what can we learn from their way of life. Genetics play a big role and can never be ignored in our observations.
Science still can not deliver proper answers to all modern issues and diseases. Evolutioary perception could be a way to find some reasonable ideas.
Ferry
The paleo diet is a framework and is more about what foods to avoid, not what to eat, though that is important as well.
Bread should be avoided because it has harmful ingredients, and is devoid of nutrition.
Broccoli, as far as I'm aware, is nutrient dense and not toxic/harmful in proper amounts. So you can eat it. It doesn't matter if it's different then paleolithic broccoli. Coconut oil, butter, dark chocolate, and coffee didn't exist in paleolithic times. I don't see a reason to avoid them.
Even one of her initial arguments about humans having longer digestive tracts then carnivores so therefore we must eat more plants fails to compare humans to other primates. We have much smaller digestive tracts then other primates.
We eat more calorie and nutrient dense animals, and not very much vegetation and fiber, so we don't need a large digestive tract like a big bellied gorilla. Cooking also contributes to making digestion easier for us.
Less time and energy spent digesting, and a smaller digestive tract is one of the reasons we have a bigger brain then other primates.
Milk can be good, if raw especially.
Paleo is supposed to be based on evolutionary biology, so it was always considered a general framework and would evolve so long as our understanding of evolutionary biology would. No one could really claim the diet as their own for that reason.