What I find is that most paleo books and people who think they are following a paleo diet are totally ignorant of paleobotany and actually archeological evidence.

"Dude they didn't have potatoes in the paleolithic and once I looked for blueberries in the winter and didn't find any, so people in the paleolithic were totally low carb!"

Yeah. The truth is that this kind of thinking is caused by our monocultural blinkers. We think of potatoes when we think of starch, not cattail tubers or acorns or sago palm or camus root. There is ample archeological evidence for use of starches such as the latter, as well as genetic adaptations for starch consumption (and separate latter adaptions is smaller populations like the Inuit who ate low-carb). I guess everyone wants to ignore the hundreds and hundreds of papers documenting preparation and consumption of these species in the paleolithic, as well as the fact that most studied modern foragers don't eat a low-carb diet.

If you want to be a reinactor, go ahead and eat some camas roots, but don't let me see you with any beef. You know they didn't have beef back then? They had aurochs. I also thought Denise Minger put the "wild fruit is sooo bitter" argument to bed?

Besides, the problem with most ancient starch is that it requires so much preparation. Thank god for modern agriculture developing starch sources that don't have to be soaked for five days to eat like sago or acorn starches. I think some people have some idea that I am talking about hunter-gatherers having some cornucopia of starch. Nope, what the studied foragers have is a full-time pursuit of starch even at the risk of death. The Inuit gather roots by robbing the nests of mice because they know that mice and humans can eat almost the same thing. Almost is the key here, there are some deadly roots in the caches and they are very very tiny. A woman has to be incredibly keen to sort them. Lower in the Americans, the plains Indians dug up lily bulbs and roasted them. Some of those were also poisonous and it can be hard to tell an edible camas from a death camas. In the Outback, women would work for hours and hours in the scorching sun to gather tiny tubers. Then grind them into edible flour with crude stones. In Papua New Guinea, women spend hours and hours grinding and soaking sago palm to reduce its toxicity. In the jungles of the Amazon, Indian women do the exact same thing with bitter cassava. In the jungles where the Pygmy live, even if they have plenty of food, if they lack starch they will say they have none. This has led them into virtual slavery to agrarian cultures that provide regular sources. In the deserts where the San live, they will chew bitter roots for hours to extract the starchy liquid, then spit out the pith. Before their extinction the Cape Hottentot peoples of South Africa would scoop out the pith of the Broodboom tree, tie it up in animal skins, bury it for weeks, dig it up and knead it to make a starchy "bread." If you study these cultures long enough, you will find they are a struggle for food in general, but the crucible is starch.

If we are going to trade anecdotes, I found and ate cowberries all the time under the snow when I lived in Sweden, as well as sorbus frozen in trees.

But as has been pointed out, low carb is relative. I eat about 150 grams a day, when on a vegan diet I ate 300 grams a day. But yeah, I'm going to resist having paleo/"ancestral eating" lumped in with low-carb.

A big wakeup call for me was when I was talking to Claire Devore, the daughter of the famous "man the hunter" anthropologist Irven. She grew up with the San, arguably the last true culture of hunter-gatherers (though not necessarily reflecting what paleolithic hgs were like). When I mentioned the paleo diet (which at the time was low-carb to me) she said she thought it was dumb because "hunter-gatherers just don't eat like that." I did my research after starting at Columbia University and getting full research access and found she was right...yes, it was a wake up call for me, being a huge proponent of the importance of meat and fat.

Some people do well on low-carb, others on high-carb. It's confusing, but it has nothing to do with the paleolithic. I'll never support folks who think they have the definitive paleo diet since that's just not what the science shows. If anything the paleolithic and the study of foragers/archeology underscores the wide variation in the diets humans can thrive eating. Personal experience might lead you to think that because you do well on low-carb, that this is the definitive paleo diet, but in reality you are a testament to human genetic variation. I am lucky my advisor is a major proponent of human variation because otherwise I think I would go nuts trying to figure out why some people crap out on low carb, while others are happy and healthy. It has little to do with the paleolithic, and a lot with genetic variation and epigenetics. In my work I am looking at genetic, bacterial, and anatomical markers that lend a clue to optimal diets for individuals.

As per the original paleo movement, in 1988 the seminal paper published by Eaton and Konner shows their estimation for paleolithic nutrient intake, which was not low carb. In their original book they recommend lots of complex carbs, including whole wheat bread. I think they changed their mind about the bread when they found out about gluten though.

Paleo is naturally lower carb, because cavemen didn't have:

pizza krispy kreme donuts hamburger buns hot dog buns cereal croissantwiches muffins snickers bars reeses peanut butter cups oreos m&ms frozen pasty bites poptarts twinkies banana cream pie doritos cheetos crackers cheezits wheat thins triscuits rice crispy treats quesadillas tacos burritos fanta coca cola twizzlers

and a bunch of other foods that many SAD americans live solely off of. many in food deserts.

Wolfang Lutz wrote about nutrition grounded in evolution and especially about carbohydrate restriction in the 1960s onwards and has done a lot to back it up – those few theoretical blog posts have not proven it wrong. There's a reason Lutz based his entire diet on the premise of limiting carbs to at most 72 grams daily, no matter the source. I think he arrived at that value through measuring blood glucose in overweight youths - any more caused hyperinsulinemia. Underweight people seemed to have a similar response. Add to that a whole bunch of other conditions that are improved under a primal low carb diet and it seems very reasonable that it is the preferred way of eating for many. Do yourself a favor and don't overindulge in loopholes like "safe" starches – unless you know for a fact you can handle it.

I think your general assessment is more or less correct.

One of the main explanations behind “whether paleo is LC or not” is perhaps simply what author/voice was popular at what time. I think Sisson, and his book Primal Blueprint, was very popular when Paleo started getting popular in general. As you rightly say, Sisson is more than others LC. His book reflects that more than any other work I’ve read.

Especially before Wolf and his books/podcast really spiked in popularity, Sisson was a major gateway into Paleo for many people. As those people though read more and more I’d say that naturally they may have realized that LC is not mandatory, etc.

Also, I really think (and I’ve said this many times here on paleohacks) that a major reason LC-or-not-LC is an issue in the Paleo world is that from the beginning Paleo has attracted two very different camps:

1. Athletic individuals more concerned with performance and general health than with losing weight.
2. People more concerned with losing weight than with performance/athleticism.

Obviously the two camps are NOT mutually exclusive, but their fuels are usually quite different.

I’d add that I feel it is somewhat unfortunate that the weight-loss camp seems to have become the more dominant voice on the internet. Please don’t think I’m bashing anyone. I simply seem to read/hear more about, say, “paleo for weight loss” than “paleo for generally being healthier and more fit” or something similar.

Your timeline is pretty accurate though I think you can pretty much credit two people for causing the shift: Stephan Guyenet and Matt Stone. Stephan for his well thought out posts and willingness to take the evidence as it is, and Matt for becoming so controversial in pointing out some of the same things that Stephan did except in a much more confrontational way culminating in the big brouhaha with Richard Nikoley and his later controversial post on Jimmy Moore. That led people to openly come out with much higher carb counts (like Dr. Harris) that had not been seen before, and the need to make it very clear that paleo did not equal low carb.

What is interesting is that when I wrote my Ten Notable Blogs for 2009 I identified Stephan as a paleo, and via private email he told me was not paleo.

Paul Jaminet was later in the game and Chris Masterjohn even later. There was a lot of movement well before either of them were somewhat prominent in paleo circles. But bottom line the impetus behind the movement in terms of carbs came from people who do not self-identify as paleo.

It really wasn't hard to predict. There are some very smart bloggers in the paleo world who couldn't keep looking at the evidence and continue to act as if low carb was the only or best way. I said when paleo first started really going mainstream that it would not remain wedded to the low carb movement. I also predicted more than a year ago that many paleos would start dropping the name altogether, and indeed that is happening.

Compared to a SAD diet, I would say it's still lower carb, no matter how you slice it. It's kind of hard to eat a lot of good for you carbs and fats and still get in the same numbers that SAD people do.

I think that timeline is a fair assessment. For me personally, it was Paul Jaminet that convinced me to increase carbs, though I'm still not quite there with his protein recs.

I still get my back up when people slag off low carb though. Low carb was the first time that I realised that controlling my weight was much easier than I had previously thought, I didn't actually need to starve. I was lucky enough to encounter a plan called the 'Idiot Proof Diet' which although low carb, was very paleo by accident (unprocessed food, carbs aren't intrinsically evil, eat organic as possible, no frankenfood).

I also didn't have wrenching gut pain and diarrhoea for the first time in 5 years which was a revelation. I admit I became a little evangelical, but I'm over it now.

So forgive me if I'm still a little defensive of low carb, there's always the danger that the pendulum could swing too far in the opposite direction and people may miss out on something that could start them on the road to better health. Low carb is a great first stepping stone for some (not all) of the metabolically challenged.

I'd suppose that it depends on what particular region or era of the Paleolithic one ascribes to.

For many, Europe/Neanderthal Paleo fits their bill. For them the low-carb model holds because of the harsh climate they lived in. Fruits were seasonal (unlike the warmer & wetter Africa and Asian continents), tubers were limited, meat and fat were heavily relied upon for calories. This falls in line with the long-standing low carb lifestyle touted by health nuts to heavy lifters, minus the fear of animal fats. But hey, we're not Neaderthals, 4% of our DNA notwithsanding. Our species developed from H. ergaster, which inhabited southern and eastern Africa. No wooly rhinos that far south!

Then you have others who, like myself, feel that anything that was edible during our long evolution (not just the few thousand years we spend in Europe) was meant to be eaten, including tubers (OMG starch! lol), fruits, greens, nuts, coconuts, meat, fish, molluscs, etc. Not so much of this "seasonal foods" mindset, because in the equatorial regions "seasons" as we know them were virtually nonexistent. Sure there were dry periods, and flooding, and maybe a cold snap here and there, but for the most part it was warm. Definitely not a low-carb model diet like the Neanderthal one, but not necessarily high-carb either.

I'm seeing a lot of misconception about what paleo actually is and I see many are really eating neolithically while erroneously calling it "paleo" because they are unaware of what the hunter-gatherer diet was really like. To those that think high carbs were a natural gatherer part of the diet, let me plagiarize myself from a comment I made earlier in this thread and then expand on it, and this is in reference to a comment about mangoes, bananas, pineapples and potatoes being in Ethiopia 200,000 years ago -

In many of these what's-paleo discussions are assumptions of what foods were actually present in the paleo world just because you see them in a grocery store and they didn't come out of a factory. Potatoes are a neolithic food, not domesticated until around 5000-7000 years ago and not even introduced out of the Andes to the world at large until 400 years ago when the Spaniards brought it home. Further, the original wild potato would hardly even be recognizable to the domesticated varieties in the store today. So the potato definitely did not exist in Ethiopa 200,000 years ago. This is what wild potatoes looked like - http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/potato.htm

One of the major reasons neolithics cultivated and domesticated plant foods is because they were not just growing abundantly in fields, ripe for the picking, like a garden of eden. They were rare and domestication made them more reliable and plentiful. So available carbs increased with neolithic endeavors. They were more scarce before. If they had been abundant there would have been no need to cultivate them in the first place. So if you're eating cultivated bulbous, domesticated potatoes from the grocery store, please do not kid yourself, you are neo.

Likewise, what are today known as "bananas," the current iteration did not even exist in paleo times. Borrowed from a page -

One of the fruit’s [the banana] wild ancestors is the Musa acuminata, a spindly plant with small, okra-like pods that were bred to produce seedless fruit. At one point, this was crossed with the heartier-looking Musa balbisiana to create plantains, and it is from plantains that our modern varieties of bananas are derived. (And yes, there’s more than just the supermarket variety.) Banana pollen and stem imprints and other sorts of fossils do show up in the archaeological record, and it looks like Musa acuminata has been cultivated since at least 6,500 years ago; the oldest evidence comes from New Guinea. From - http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2011/07/taming-the-wild-banana/

So bananas are neolithic. If you eat bananas, you are not paleo!

As for more northern climes, my wife and I have picked wild blueberries on hillsides in northern Maine and Canada. You can only find them 3 to 4 months of the year. These are smaller than the domesticated variety you find in the store. So if you are eating big blueberries and you are eating them all year long, you are not eating paleo. This carb was available only a short time out of the year.

My point here is that most produce today is a far cry from their original wild ancestors and they have been cultivated to to get rid of fibrous tissue, seeds and to increase flesh and sugar content, which increases carbs. This was done because many of the orginals bordered on inedible. And the supply was not consistent.

Except for possibly very few locales, carbs were scarce, so if you eat high carbs, you are not really eating paleo. So if you're eating wild potatoes in Peru, okra-pod-like wild bananas in southeast Asia, and blueberries only in the the months of July through October, You could possibly call yourself paleo. Or you could just forget about all the carbs and be really paleo.

Ed

Staffan linderberg has been recommending a high carb kitavan style paleo diet for around 10 years or more. His book "Food and Western Disease: Health and nutrition from an evolutionary perspective" came out in sweden in 2003.

I think most people switched to the higher carb camp because they realized VLC only works if your obese and trying to lose weight or have specific health problems.

Your perception of how it played out is very accurate in my opinion, though I'd put it a bit farther back than 1 year - maybe 2 for Stephan Guyenet.

Since age has been brought up a couple of times in this thread, for a lark, I went back over a number of these posts and comments making a note of ages of the posters and it's apparent that most of the fruitaholics and the starchaholics pushing for revisionism of the paleo diet are in their 20s and 30s. This is most telling. When I was in my 20s and 30s I could do just about anything and get away with it but that didn't hold up. Today I have very little to do with fruit and starch and I explained the reason why a few days ago over here -

http://paleohacks.com/questions/50347/hack-jack-kronks-vap-test-results/50907#50907

Not only that, most younger adults are prone to excepting theories as long as it meshes with emotional attachments. Nothing like physical degeration to unlatch those. I don't mean to come off sounding patronizing, but it might be better not to fix everything is stone just yet.

So begging your forgiveness for operating with the benefit of hindsight and experience, I'm curious how many will be able to hang onto their newly acquired dogma into the decades. I read Denise Minger's paper and if that's what you're clinging to as proof of your general theory of paleotivity, please keep a light rein. I am fairly certain many of you down the path will not look back as it recedes over the horizon. It was a nice paper, interesting, and I did learn a few things about giant African fruit, but not one thing that could be incorporated by a European, North American or most Asians. I noticed she is rather young too. I wonder if someone could prod her expound on my still very valid example of the banana. Or would that not gel with the agenda?

Anyway the effects of sugar and starch in the long run is what will bring most knowledgeable people back to the real paleo.

Ed

Edit: Sorry for my absense - prior commitments...

If we can momentarily sidestep all the unbridled and brash, youthful potshots (which I may come back to), I'd like to return to the discussion concerning carbs in the paleolithic. The OP question implied that the original paleo conventional wisdom once said that the paleo diet was once known as low carb but that later conventional "wisdom" has attempted to morph that into something high, or least higher carb. So Curated Wellness asked - "Am I crazy or is this really how the low-carb history of paleo went? Were carbs always welcome in the paleo scene?

And I think I might be able to lend further perspective to an interesting question. Back when I was a vegetarian and opened a vegetarian restaurant (35 years ago when a certain young moderator was minus 10) and it was well "known" to vegetarians at the time that banana-eating monkeys dropped down out of the trees, stood upright, developed opposing thumbs with which to pick up sticks to hit each other, but otherwise lived in some sort of fruitopian, vegetarian bliss, where a bountiful feast was only within arm's reach. So the original paleo to the vegetarian cult was high carb and vegetarian. This was a popular notion at the time and was a useful means to drive and motivate vegetarianism and I think still exists today. It might even be prevalent in the forum. I haven't been here long enough to really know. Maybe we have closet or mole vegetarians. But I was right there with it so you might say that I've been dealing with the question of what's-paleo for a long time. But I was incorrect then, just as incorrect as a certain young moderator is about paleo including lots of fruits and high carbs.

But in earlier posts I was rather untactfully pointed to Denise Minger's paper on giant African fruits, the relevance of which still evades me (but more on that), but I also learned that my life was shambles because I was "ignorant" and old and I saw a linked picture for the first time of what I really looked like and it was devastatingly unbecoming. "O wad some Power the gift tae gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us" (Burns) But now that I know how you like me and I have regained my composure, I can press on with why I reject Minger's paper as evidence of high carbs in the paleolithic. Not reject it for it's intended purpose, mind you, but reject it as a weapon wielded by a certain young moderator in defense of high carbs because it was erroneously confused with paleo diet. For it's intended purpose she did quite well and after stating the four myths she wanted to dispel. she admits -

"*Virtually all the food we have available today—from plant and animal kingdoms alike—has been selectively bred for both flavor and ease of eating, and fruit is certainly no exception. It seems reasonable to conclude that, apart from the rare batch of honey or seasonal berry bushes popping up outside, humans didn’t get much exposure to sugar during our evolution, and modern fruits are completely unlike anything we encountered in the past.

But are these assumptions truly accurate? Let’s take a look at the facts.*"

But she is selective in her fruits and the facts she uses are very narrow in scope. Her premise is that some ancient fruits are basically equivalent to modern ones and that's OK as far as it goes. She didn't fully eradicate any "myths" by using selective examples and my own example of evolution of bananas and potatoes (although not fruit) and many others attest to the fact that the scope of this study is narrow, but here's why it did not portray the paleo diet.

Like I said in an earlier post in reference to A.J. Aguirre's bananas and potatoes in Ethiopia (which started my whole drift), just because you currently see lots of produce in a grocery store, it in no means that it was present during paleo times, and we all know that. Just like when Denise Minger went to Africa (I'm assuming she did), it no way indicates that all those giant African fruit were present in paleo times.

We came out of the Pleistocene 11-12,000 years ago at the end of the last glacial period. The beginning of the Pleistocene is roughly 2.5 million years ago and the Pleistocene itself roughly coincides with the advent of modern hominids. This would be our beloved paleo era. During these periods of repeated glaciation Africa was a very dry place, so much so that the African woodlands retreated to just three small patches during glacial maxima and there was broad expanse of African savannas and grasslands. Not much fruit or tubers in grassland, but the important part is coming up.

The earth's ecliptic plane changes seasonally in relation to the sun, but we all know this. The north pole is sunny in summer and dark in winter, etc, but the surface of the earth closest to the sun near the equator keeps moving in cycles above the equator and then below the equator and so on. That surface gets direct perpendicular heat from the sun causing the humid air to heat up and rise to altitude which causes the air to cool and condense into rain. So as the changing eliptical plane of the earth moves up and down in relation to the sun, the rain likewise moves above the equator and then below the equator and these are the monsoons. As the monsoons move north then south, then north, then south, hoofed animals follow these rains and these are known as the great migrations.

I mentioned in an earlier post that paleos were nomadic because they chased after game when an area became depleted, and because they went high in summer and low in winter. Well this is another reason. They followed the hoofed migrations because they were going where the food was going.

I'm not sure how long this went on but you had the better part of 2.5 million years to get this pattern established and when you see illustrations of paleo people out in vast grasslands, this is what you are looking at. So as, I said before, the African woodlands retreated to three small patches. Before this happened there was one main species of gorilla. Here is the diet of the herbivorous gorilla -

*The diet of a gorilla consists primarily of fruits, leaves, shoots, shrubs, vines, tree bark, flowers and a variety of other plant matter. http://www.ehow.com/about_4580393_gorilla-diet.html*

Originally gorilla habitat was broad, as broad as the woodlands use to be. As the woodlands shrank, the supply of gorilla feed and fruits (and habitat) shrank with it till there were separate groups of gorillas which eventually diverged into subspecies.

Maybe now you can see where I am going with this. If the available gorilla carbs dropped to such low levels, so low that the gorilla couldn't thrive and almost died out retreating to small patches, and yet nomadic humans were traipsing north and south thriving on animals, and this went on for most the Pleistocene, where is the evidence that carbs had anything to do with this? Grasslands are not carb friendly, yet the hooved animals were capable of converting grass into protein.

Today in Africa, most of that rainforest has recovered since the end of the last ice age, but the gorilla populations have not re-established contact (and probably never will in today's Africa). But as the forest recovered so did the supply of fruit and that was what Denise Minger saw.

So we need to keep it all in context and keep open minds. When I said "real paleo" I'm into what really happened back then and not somebody's cockeyed hypothesis or romantic faux interpretation of it. Some of you younger guys just internalize something because it seems to fit and then you shoot from the hip at anybody who disagrees with you. A little cognitive dissonance will not fail you. And maybe a little humility...

Ed

It's the Kitavans, man. The Kitavans started the turnaround.

Wow, that was a lot of unnecessary vitriol I just waded through in those other answers. Anyway, I don't think the Hadza were mentioned, but this is a good paper on the nutritional analysis of the tubers they ate pretty much year-round: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fanthro.ucsd.edu%2FFaculty_Profiles%2Fmargaret%2FMarlett%2520etal.2001.pdf&rct=j&q=hadza%20tuber&ei=O71WTt6jKqbSiAKO7eyrCQ&usg=AFQjCNHH6_KHpXGRZepdAhKVRsUF27ZfaQ&sig2=hxkk8eOOt1YaR8rg1v-yZg&cad=rja I can't really do better than that for a link.

That wasn't their only source of carb, since they ate honey, baobab, berries etc. but that was probably the most consistent. Even though I personally eat about 200g a day, I have to admit that starch acquisition, at least in the case of the Hadza, requires quite a bit of glycolytic activity, and thus adds a further level to determining "net carbs." So, you have the carb content of the tubers, minus the (considerable) amount of fiber and also minus the amount of muscle glycogen it takes to dig 3 meters underground (in some cases) with a sharpened stick.

I find "low" or "high" carb to be kind of messy. It's better to look at it as those who choose to undershoot CHO glycogen repletion in favor of protein-derived gluconeogenesis, others who overshoot like me in order to decrease that pathway and also to never dip down into unpleasant hypoglycemia and still others go low enough in carb and protein like Gedgaudas, in which case I don't really know how they can replete glycogen without the catabolism of muscle. In any case, it's all meaningless until you try each out and see which one feels the best.

I think that Paleo is INDEED still a LC diet in nature. Who says it's not? Granted, there is no 1 size fits all version of "Paleo".

Based on 5 months of reading, I think it boils down to what you can get away with and still get desired results. For most people, the desired result is either weight loss or good performance at a desired weight. Other than a lucky few who seem able to eat anything they want within Paleo/Primal parameters, most people have to either:

1. restrict calories with a risk of feeling deprived and the issues that causes
2. restrict food type--go low on either carbs or fats, in which case many people feel it's healthier to go low on carbs if you must choose
3. restrict how often you eat (IF.)

In my case, I follow option 3 and eat 1 meal per day. I average 75-150 grams of carbs and as much protein/fat as I can eat in that large meal. I don't suffer physical hunger until the next day although I do have "wish I had soda" moments. In my 5 months I've lost about 30 pounds.

My only critique of your timeline is that it doesn't start early enough. I became interested in the Paleo diet about 6 or 7 years ago, having been pointed to the Loren Cordain's work through Crossfit. Although "low carb" is admittedly relative, Cordain's recommendations weren't particularly low carb - at least, that was not his emphasis. I remember "lean meats" and "unlimited fruits and vegetables". Around 20-30% of calories from carbs. This fits with the fact that it was combined with the Zone, which is not particularly low carb or high fat. Then people started tinkering with the Zone, upping the fat blocks and cutting out carbs... Robb Wolf's how to skin the Zone article was pretty influential, I think. After this, it strikes me that people became pretty extreme in their carb-phobia - although I think Good Calories, Bad Calories was excellent in many respects, it really fanned the anti-carb flames in paleo circles. I'm happy to see things returning to a more moderate place regarding carbs, much more in line with Cordain's original recommendations.