Book Review - "The Paleo Solution" by Robb Wolf

If you've been in a bookstore lately, you might have seen a new book, "The Paleo Solution", by Robb Wolf (published by Victory Belt publishing in 2010). I was curious, so I picked up a copy. I don't always know when to shut up, so here's my review.

It's a moderately-sized book, under 300 pages (plus 30 pages of references) in thirteen chapters. Much of the information therein is probably old news to most paleo / primal adherents, although the comparison/contrast between the viewpoints of anthropologists and nutritional scientists was rather amusing to read. He goes through a lot of the underlying biology, explaining how and why our bodies work (or don't work, when we eat the wrong things), but in a fairly easy-to-read format. A minor quibble for me is that he spends a couple of chapters explaining why grains are super-bad, but then hand-waves to dismiss dairy and legumes in a couple of paragraphs (although he does provide references for follow-up). To be honest, this probably bugs me as much because we haven't cut dairy out of our diets as anything else. Cheese makes things good, that's all I'm saying.

He also includes both sample work-outs (with pictures) and sample menus. As such, I consider this book to be a relatively complete source for the paleo newbie, although I would encourage them to do follow-up reading after finishing this one. An additional plus is the inclusion of a section on dietary supplements, listed in order from "must-take" to "optional" (my words, not his).

For being an easy-to-read book with specific menus, good examples, and exercise instructions, but with no index at the back for easy browsing, and for the hand-waving I mentioned above, I'd give this book a solid "A-" if I was assigning letter grades to books. Buy this one for someone you want to nudge in the paleo direction.

(In other news, Fathead is now available in Canada via Chapters/Indigo - I'll be ordering a copy this week, and when I've had a chance to watch it I'll post a review up here.)

Book Review: The Paleo Diet

The Paleo Diet, written by Loren Cordain, Ph. D., is one of the few books out there specifically devoted to the paleo way of eating. It's divided into three main sections, "Understanding the Paleo Diet", "Losing Weight and Preventing and Healing Disease", and "The Paleo Diet Program".

The first section covers the basics of the diet - the "rules", as it were. And, unfortunately, this is where it starts to go wrong. While Dr. Cordain makes a strong case for the fact that we're not that different from our ancestors going back a thousand generations, and thus grain and starch and refined sugars are not things that should be in our diet, he still is unwilling or unable to make the final leap - fat. He claims that the meat eaten by our ancestors would have been the leanest muscle meat, whereas it is well documented in modern-primitive cultures that the fattiest portions (such as brain tissue) are highly coveted delicacies. Later in the book, he also makes a strong case for Omega-3 fatty acid consumption, but then advocates using flax seed oil. It is well established that the kind of O3 fatty acid in flax seed oil, ALA, is not the kind our body needs, and is only weakly converted to DHA and EPA within the body.

The second section of the book discusses the health aspects of the diet. Not too much to argue with here, except he continues his apparent hatred of animal fats, stressing the leanness of proteins to be consumed. He also relies on BMI tables, whereas modern medical thinking is moving away from using the BMI as an indicator of health (given that it was never intended for that in the first place). Curiously, he does discuss in this section how grains raise the "small, dense" (AKA dangerous) LDL cholesterol, but doesn't seem to discuss much about how the fats from meat raise the HDL (good) cholesterol and thus improve the overall HDL/LDL ratio in the body. If he did this, he might have to stop stressing "lean" protein so much, though.

More than half the book is taken up by the third part, "The Paleo Diet Program", because it contains six weeks' worth of recipes and food plans, as well as a discussion of what is and is not allowed under his version of the diet. He also advocates a three-stage introduction to the diet, where in the first stage you can "cheat" three times a week at "open meals", in the second stage twice a week, and in the third stage once a week. Oddly, he allows diet sodas "in moderation" in his version of the diet, as well as low-fat salad dressings (which tend to contain a lot of sugar).

In summary, while much of the background information Dr. Cordain gives in this book is quite useful, his conclusions are at best coloured by "conventional wisdom". Unless you truly believe that our neolithic ancestors dined on the breast meat of wild chickens, with a side of lettuce smothered in low-fat thousand island dressing, and washing it down with a diet cola, you might be better served looking elsewhere for solid day-to-day advice.

It probably seems like I'm being unduly hard on this book. Maybe I am. But it just seems to "go halfway", and misses the endgame, in my opinion. But what do I know? I'm just a caveman.

Book Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories

There are a number of books out there devoted to various versions of the "paleo lifestyle", each with their own vision of the best way to live "the way things were". However, today I want to bring to your attention a book that doesn't even try to tell you how to eat - at least, not directly. "Good Calories, Bad Calories" was written by Gary Taubes, and published by Anchor Books, initially in 2007 (and softcover in 2008).

Gary Taubes is not a doctor, a nutritionist, a paleo-anthropologist, or anything like that. He's a science journalist. He makes a living writing about the research that other people do, and his articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. In fact, that's where the inspiration for this book came from - through an article he wrote for the NYTM called "What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie?", which questioned the value of low-fat diets for weight loss.

Following on from the research for that article, Gary interviewed hundreds of people and read hundreds of scientific papers. The bibliography of my (softcover) edition of the book is 66 pages in length. In other words, this book draws on an awful lot of material, and he tells you where to check if you don't believe him.

There isn't nearly enough room in this blog to tell everything he covers in the book (and that would be plagiarism besides), but the evidence he lays out is pretty damning of the state of "nutritional guidelines" today, and a solid foundation for the paleo lifestyle. Chiefly, there is a lot of evidence he covers that strongly indicates that dietary fats (as long as they're the right kind of fats - as a hint, vegetable oils are not your friends) are not all that bad for us, and refined carbohydrates are, in fact, public enemy number one (dietarily speaking, anyway).

Curiously, (and this is my chief complaint about the book) Gary never actually goes "the last mile" and draws any hard conclusions - he's obviously leaving that up to the reader. However, if you read this book (and everybody should), you will come away with a feeling that the Western diet is "doing it wrong".

This book will tell you what's wrong with diets today. If you want to understand a lot of the science behind the paleo diet, this would be a very good first step.

As a bonus, here is a link to a copy of the Letter On Corpulence, written by William Banting in 1863 - a hundred years before Doctor Atkins and his "New Diet Revolution" (hosted on the Atkins website, no less).