Paleo Diet and Paleolithic Diet Questions & Answers

Question

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My understanding is that, in general, our grandparents were healthy people. They certainly ate grains. So, what's wrong with grains?

Having been the chapter head of WAPF in Santa Fe for a number of years, and pretty Paleo now, I do understand that traditional ways of cooking (e.g. long slow fermentation of dough for bread) plus non-diet factors -- less stress, stronger family and community ties, hard work, being more in tune with the seasons, less poison in the air and in our food, and other factors -- contributed to their health.

Why do we make guesses about what paleolithic people ate when diet and health data from 100 years ago is much easier to get and doesn't make a case for eliminating properly prepared grains. What's changed in the last century that targets grains?

flag	asked Mar 24 2012 at 23:26 Sol 6,430●1●10●37

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The dwarf wheat of today ain't the 4-ft tall stuff they ate, which in turn is far different than spelt or einkorn – Wowza Mar 24 2012 at 23:59

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My grandparents had heart disease, and my grandmother had 2 bypass surgeries, osteoporosis, and multiple strokes, despite never being overweight. Anecdotal, I know, but still.... – NewEra Mar 25 2012 at 3:42

David Rourke · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-25 00:12:54Z UTC

Several points:

The wheat they were eating was not the modern dwarf variety. In many cases the grains they ate were traditionally processed to remove many toxic properties.
Most of their food was made at home, from scratch. There was no fast food.
All the meat they ate was pastured/grass fed. All of the eggs were from pastured chickens. None of the veggies were grown in an environment destroyed by pesticides.
There was much less of what we would consider processed food.
They were not burdened with health experts insisting that they eliminate arterycloggingsaturatedfat.

Mscott · Answer 2 · 2012-03-24 23:50:00Z UTC

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Eating whole grain sourdough bread is preferable to eating Cheetos, but that doesn't make the former optimal. Our grandparents may have been healthier than we are today, but they were not free from degenerative illness and for all we know may have improved by eating less grain and more animal products, fruit, tubers, etc.

answered Mar 24 2012 at 23:50

Mscott
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However, I don't really think grains are "so bad for us", that's highly dependent on the person, the grain, and the method of preparation. – Mscott Mar 24 2012 at 23:55

Matt · Answer 3 · 2012-03-24 23:54:49Z UTC

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I'll echo what others are saying, our grandparents aren't/weren't necessarily healthy. But at least they didn't live through the perfect shitstorm of crappy nutrition and problematic chemical exposure we're living through now.

answered Mar 24 2012 at 23:54

Matt
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Is there any statistical data pointing to poor health among our grandparents? I imagine that many of us on PH do Paleo because our grandparents and parents are/were sick and we don't want to end up like them. That's certainly my draw to Paleo. So, comments about our own grandparents having been sick may skew the data. Healthy non-Paleo people with health non-Paleo grandparents aren't being counted in these comments. – Sol Mar 25 2012 at 0:03

Don't get me wrong, they did better than we're doing today. But I think we can do even better than that. – Matt Mar 25 2012 at 0:04

My dad was paranoid about trichinosis because he knew people who had it. Say what you want about modern poisons but I'll take the improved sanitation and food inspection of today over what they had 50 years ago. – thhq Mar 25 2012 at 0:57

Sigrid · Answer 4 · 2012-03-25 00:29:36Z UTC

Interesting question.

Cardiovascular disease was already a leading cause of death back in 1935: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db88.htm#heart - which is my great-grandparent's generation.Rates of stroke haven't changed much; the only thing going up is cancer. But that might just be because life expectancy has increased. The discovery of penicillin, better treatment for TB, better treatment for injuries, ability to get to hospitals faster etc meant that many more people lived to an age where they could have developed cancer. Also, like other people point out, cancer was perhaps not always diagnosed with accuracy in days of yore.

Nemesis · Answer 5 · 2012-03-24 23:48:51Z UTC

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I don't know about that. My grandpa died in his late 70's several years ago from bone and prostate cancer. Granny is still kicking, but she lost all of her teeth years ago and all of her sunbathing over the decades has really added years to her.

We might need to go even further back, to great or great-great-grandparents. Even then, who knows if they had chronic illnesses which they kept hidden out of shame/misdiagnosis/social stigma? Back then, illnesses were treated by doctors at home, and remedies were often ineffective if not outright dangerous (bloodletting, anyone?). Also, diagnostic technology was primitive, and these people could have been riddled with tumors or other degenerative diseases and no one would have known about it.

answered Mar 24 2012 at 23:48

Nemesis
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If anthropologists can make guesses about what paleo people ate I expect them to be able to make guesses about the rate of chronic disease in our grandparents. Does anyone know if this data exists? – Sol Mar 25 2012 at 0:05

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yeah, the data isn't good though since medicine was more art than science until recently, but it's there. A good place to start would be gout, which has plagued middle and upper-middle class agrarian folks for quite some time. I would say that past generations were healthier when young. They did get degenerative diseases, but not until they were much older than today. You didn't see teenagers with type 2 diabetes until recently. – Bread-Eating Beelzebub Mar 25 2012 at 0:20

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We don't know that. There is only so much you can learn from bones. Most cancers don't show up and heart disease/diabetes doesn't either. Most of the degenerative disease speculation is based on studies like the Kitavan study, on modern foraging populations. Based on that and other studies, I'd rather be an old person on Kitavan than my great-great-grandmother. No gout on Kitava. – Bread-Eating Beelzebub Mar 25 2012 at 0:29

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Yeah, I have healthy people in my family who ate grains who are 93-99. Diet isn't everything, though those women I would note are under-eaters, so perhaps caloric restriction played a role. There is no way to know about heart disease in paleolithic populations, but you can know about other health conditions. The problem is that healthy skeletal populations aren't only hunter-gatherers, there are some farmers in the collection too. – Bread-Eating Beelzebub Mar 25 2012 at 1:33

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Actually Sol we have excellent public health records in several countries that go back a long time, some based on parish and church records. The UK has very good public health information - the first scientific stab at public health and epidemiology was written by Graunt in 1662. The London Epidemiological Society kept good records for the Victorian era as well. – Wowza Mar 25 2012 at 1:34

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thhq · Answer 6 · 2012-03-25 00:47:43Z UTC

My parents are healthier than my grandparents were, despite both generations eating a lot of grain products. Longevity has increased substantially over the past 10 generations for a number of reasons unrelated to grains. Modern humans have been eating grains and grain products as staple foods for at least 500 generations. We thrive on them and it's silly to argue that we don't.

I don't think digestibility or longevity have much to do with the current problem with grains. I think that we have lost the ability to eat them rationally. They're cheap - much cheaper than protein of any kind - and in our stupidity we overeat them. I stupidly overate cheap dry wheat breakfast cereal (free actually, they were giving away cases of it at work) until I was obese and diabetic. It tasted great and I stuffed myself with it. My adipose fat cells showed their gratitude by expanding and filling up my abdominal cavity.

My grandparents had problems similar to mine. My parents are smarter and control their eating of sugary and starchy foods. So far they've outlived their parents by 10 years. Would they do better on a paleo diet? Maybe, but they're doing pretty well as it is.

Dragonfly · Answer 7 · 2012-03-25 00:49:03Z UTC

I don't know if your premise is true --especially for city-raised people, or for those born in poverty. All my relatives were urbanites and poor working-class folk.

My Maternal Grandmother died of diabetes-related complications at 88.

(Maternal Grandfather is unknown.)

My Paternal Grandfather died of a stroke at 82.

My Paternal Grandmother died of a heart attack at 84.

So I have a relatively long-lived family, but they have all died of degenerative diseases. I'm 49.

AmandaLP · Answer 8 · 2012-07-02 02:35:31Z UTC

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There is a lot of mouse research that suggests that the "problems" with diet are cumulative over generations. Pottenger's cats ended up sterile after 4 generations (which, granted, was probably about lack of an amino acid necessary for cats, but still.).

Our grandparents had very little access to restaurant food, additives, trans fats, genetically altered food, and all the other crap that we have ready access to now. The types of damages that we are seeing now are cumulative, and getting worse.

answered Jul 2 at 2:35

AmandaLP
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	Over 4 generations I think they are reversible. For instance, over 500 generations we have become increasingly sedentary. Olympic records continue to improve, demonstrating that our ability to reverse the negative effects of sedentism has not declined. – thhq Jul 2 at 15:42
	Amanda, you beat me to it! I was going to bring up Pottenger and how the damage compounds through successive generations. Look at children today - they are suffering the most...more than we do, and we're getting sicker younger than our parents, and they got sicker younger than their parents..... – Amy B. Jul 2 at 18:51
	I've heard that the Pottenger cat "thing" was hugely flawed and not a good study to use to draw any conclusions about humans. I wish I could find that reference.... anyone know? – misstenacity Jul 17 at 15:44
	Basically, Pottenger did not know that cats needed taurine, which is destroyed when food is cooked. Thus, the cooked cats could have diet from this deficiency. I didn't use it for this example specifically, but as a more general "bad eating/deficiencies can cause effects through the generations." – AmandaLP Jul 17 at 16:01

Knejuhl · Answer 9 · 2012-03-25 01:08:24Z UTC

I would think a lot of it has to do with the intensive agriculture that we have today. We have lost so many varieties of grains by breeding only what was the best producer, etc. The biggest problem is when you continually breed something for a good dominant trait you end up with a abundance of bad recessive traits as well, you see it a lot in livestock breeding and we don't think about it as much on plants but when you decrease the size of the gene pool you have problems and we are then putting those problems in our bodies, well that and the amount of processing of foods.

balor123 · Answer 10 · 2012-03-25 01:10:16Z UTC

My grandparents were afflicted with the following disorders: cancer, possible diabetes, suspected alzheimer's, and stroke. They grew up and died in various places, none in the US. It is a fallacy that our grandparents are healthy but I don't think it's correct to point out that they weren't healthier than we will be. Within 20 years, one out of two Americans is expect to have type 2 diabetes. That alone substantially increases risks for lots of other diseases. There's no way that degenerative diseases won't increase in prevalence. Some if it will certainly be better ability to detect it but I don't think that can fully or even mostly account for the increase. My great grandparents all died in war so I can't comment on them but I know one was diabetic.

paleopinoy · Answer 11 · 2012-07-02 02:19:35Z UTC

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Diet and grains are not the only things that cause degenerative diseases. There are so many variables beyond what you eat.

answered Jul 2 at 2:19

paleopinoy
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Chinaeskimo · Answer 12 · 2012-07-02 02:48:15Z UTC

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Maybe it's not the amount of grain, but how processed it's become. Ever see those wrapped pastries they sell at the gas stations? Or the tons of Little Debbie/Hostess type things at the market? Much more common today than in my grandparents day when they ate bakery bread.

answered Jul 2 at 2:48

Chinaeskimo
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	And how convenient, and how cheap. My nemesis was frosted mini wheats. – thhq Jul 2 at 15:46
	Yeah - I think even the most anti-gluten folks here can admit that for someone with strong digestion and no allergies, there's a huge difference between a homemade wheatberry salad and that same wheat being milled and processed into, say, Frosted Flakes or Little Debbie brownies. – Amy B. Jul 2 at 18:53

misstenacity · Answer 13 · 2012-07-02 01:44:35Z UTC

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Maybe great grandparents is the better question. My grandparents came of age in the depression and ate boatloads of refined flour, margarine, crisco, etc. They died of things like CVD, diabetes (type 1, though), stroke, kidney failure, dementia, and etc. No cancer in that group, though. I never knew their parents but maybe it was better for them.

answered Jul 2 at 1:44

misstenacity
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Agree -- depending on how old we all are, some of our grandparents were only in their 30s-50s when good ol' Ancel Keys made the scene, so they spent their later decades eating lots of low-fat and fat-free stuff, margarine, skim milk, sugary cereals, etc. We probably have to go back to at least our great-great grandparents to find people who spent their whole lives on much better food. (And even then, there was still candy and bread and all that, but nothing like we have today.) – Amy B. Jul 2 at 18:49

If our grandparents ate grains and had a low rate of degenerative diseases, why are grains so bad for us?

13 Answers