Paleolithic Diet Better Than Mediterranean Diet?

you can call that diet anything you want its still the Atkins diet and Dr.A said it would straighten out your diabetes 30 yrs ago..

This is the basic diet I used to lose over 60 pounds. I have found it very effective.

Brian

The Paleolithic Diet doesn't include loads of butter and high fat meats or excessive amounts of meat, which is, by the way, what most of the people who are on the Atkins Diet tend to eat, instead of the lean meats and fish and butter free veggies and red meat in moderate amounts like you are supposed to.

You can claim Atkins works all you want to, however, the long term effects aren't so good. The ketosis stage of the Atkins diet is very, very harmful to your body. And the amount of red meat people consume on this diet is dangerous. Too much red meat can cause cancer in case you didn't know, and so can too much dairy. I do not recommend the Atkins diet because of these reasons.

The Paleolithic Diet is not the Atkins diet. Atkins requires excessive meat. Paleotithic requires moderation...because in the stone age, most people didn't get to eat their meat every day.

Eat natural foods of the type you could conceivable forage or hunt for yourself? Seems pretty straightforward to me!

Yes, yes, it's better for me... but we're missing a very important point here... It means I have to avoid dairy and grains. ;)

I

The Paleo Diet is not the same as Atkins. (Paleo allows more carbs, and generally puts more emphasis on micronutrients and less on macronutrients than Atkins.)

Also, while Loren Cordain's version of the Paleo diet emphasizes "lean meats," Cordain may well be wrong about what our Stone Age ancestors actually ate. Others contend that hunter-gatherers would have preferentially eaten the fattiest parts of the animal (e.g., the brain and bone marrow), and that overall fat intake was much higher than Cordain recommends.

Also, ketosis isn't harmful, and red meat in the form of wild game doesn't cause cancer (although supermarket beef raised on corn and pumped full of hormones may).

So to summarize, eat unprocessed foods in moderation. Sounds like a great idea. :)

Gal

I blog about this issue in depth. Recommended:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/category/primal-health/

Cheers! There's nothing too "wacky" about this diet - to me it's not really a diet, but simply eating in step with how we're genetically suited.

corafan said:
The Paleo Diet is not the same as Atkins. (Paleo allows more carbs, and generally puts more emphasis on micronutrients and less on macronutrients than Atkins.)[...]

Good post.

Very good post. The key differences are that the Paleolithic diet uses foods in their raw form and the carbohydrates are higher in fiber content.

Many studies for example, support the idea that fiber is more important than the glycemic index of food, in reducing symptoms of diabetes such as glucose intolerance.

Let's put some things into perspective. The Mediterranean diet might not have been as effective at lowering blood sugars, but it still helped lower them by 7 percent -- which certainly isn't a bad thing.

But what has not been discussed is the fact that research has found that the Mediterranean diet is very effective at preventing type 2 diabetes from developing in the first place.

Dozens of meticulously conducted studies have also found that the Mediterranean diet substantially reduces the risk of developing heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and cancers of the breast, prostate and colon.
A traditional Mediterranean diet is also associated with low rates of obesity and long life spans.

But forget about all of the health benefits -- one of the biggest benefits is that the food is highly enjoyable, so it makes this way of eating easy to stick to over the long term.

Additionally its the amount that people like to burn their meat and eat it well done that can cause carcinogens. Burnt anything isn't particularly good for you. Ask the RAW-ies. Honestly I think science will find that the ideal diet has more to do with individual makeup and INDIVIDUAL heredity. Ex. People from Northern European ancestry will find that whatever their ancestors learned to survive on 3000-5000 years ago will probably be healthiest, people from pacific island ancestry will find the same thing, people from Native American Ancestry will be told to eat Maize and Buffalo and plants native to the USofA, and people from the Mediterranean... Mediterranean diets... etc etc. Ethnic/Genetic Paleolithic... we may even find that it explains food intolerances. Etc.

Erica said:
Ex. People from Northern European ancestry will find that whatever their ancestors learned to survive on 3000-5000 years ago will probably be healthiest, people from pacific island ancestry will find the same thing, people from Native American Ancestry will be told to eat Maize and Buffalo and plants native to the USofA, and people from the Mediterranean... Mediterranean diets... etc etc. Ethnic/Genetic Paleolithic... we may even find that it explains food intolerances. Etc.[...]

Yeah, that's sort of true, but the reason that Northern Europeans ate berries and reindeer and survived was because that's what was around. The human body is very versatile and can survive and thrive on a HUGE variety of different foods. If you took a Native American and put them in a different climate and educated them about what was edible there, I'm sure they'd figure out a way to survive too. I think the main point of this paleolithic thing is to avoid processed foods and go back to eating like people did a long time ago. You don't need a special diet book to tell you that.

I wonder why this type of diet is nearly opposite of what the American Diabetes Association has to offer.

frances said:
I wonder why this type of diet is nearly opposite of what the American Diabetes Association has to offer. [...]

Maybe because farmers of whole foods (berries, nuts, seeds, produce, etc.) aren't their main sponsors (money contributors) like food manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies are?