Paleo = 55% carbs, 20% fat and 25% protein

[Rikke Olsen]

Yes, you read that correctly. Don Matezs from Primal Wisdom, (previously) high advocate of a high fat diet, but since his post http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-said-paleo-diet-had-high-fat.html?showComment=1305626614368, he will change it to (calorie-wise) 20% fat, 25% protein and 55% carbs.

It's a two-part series, and I'm VERY interested in seeing his next post on the subject!

What do you all think about this? Would you (if you are high-fat-low-carb Paleo) make a 180 degree turn and become carb-fueled, given the studies are legit?

[Joshua Naterman]

If you think about it, the only people who really have mostly fat diets are the Inuits. If you're eating meat and veggies, like pretty much the entire world has done, that 55/20/25 breakdown is a reasonable thing to expect. I don't know why anyone would be surprised by this lol! The core concept of Paleo is to not eat food that comes in a box. As long as you do that much you are pretty much winning.

As for defatting things, that is probably a good idea if you're dealing with grainfed beef, since it has 4-5x more fat than it should. As for the rest, just like in every other method of cooking all the fat melts when you cook the meat. I have yet to see a chicken retain hardly any fat on the meat after I have cooked it. All the fat renders down and is pooled up in my baking pan, leaving crispy skin.

At any rate, my point is that there is no reason to flip out over percentages. If you are eating meats and veggies you ARE going to end up with the aforementioned breakdown unless you are intentionally trying not to, even if you're eating 200g of protein a day. That's 800 calories, which is about 25% of a 3200 calorie maintenance diet for a 200 lb man, which is just about right on point. As the article points out, it takes a LOT of veggies to do this, which goes right along with what I have been saying. A lot of it will be green leafy stuff, because there's more of that than anything else. Just go outside and take a look around, you'll see this is true.

Great post!

[Rikke Olsen]

I think it is funny, as the author recently (in January) thought of a diet with 20% carbs to be too much.

Slizz, have you checked out The Perfect Health Diet? The name is kinda cheeze, but they are really bright people. They back their theory of 65% fats, 20% carbs (veggies excluded) and 15% protein up with numerous studies. I'm sure it is something you could geek into

I'm reading their book, and even though I'm no professor in nutrition (actually, very far from) I see the sense and logic, and I really enjoy their book. They also have a whole lot of blog posts to begin with.

[Uzeeh]

I beg to differ on this one. Humans would eat mostly the fatty parts of meat, like brains, the marrow etc, not the muscles. While indeed the fat percent of the meat is low in wild game, I don't even think we'd get the muscles - scavenging other animals' game seems like a reasonable guess, and they don't leave much meat behind. Plus, there's nuts and fish. A fat percentage of 30-50 percent seems more reasonable.

[Joshua Naterman]

When you consider that total fat percentage of wild game, excluding bears and other blubbery beasts, is something like 5% it isn't a huge surprise that there simply isn't enough fat in a kill to provide everyone with enough fat to get 50% of calories from animal fat. That's just a practical matter, I don't think that can really be argued.

Now obviously, if you're living in an area where the game is fattier (seals, bears, etc) you will be able to and probably WILL have a higher fat percentage. Our bodies can adjust to these within a few weeks, which also makes sense considering the seasonal patterns that game and hunting societies have (or would have had to have) in middle latitudes. In the tropics there isn't much of anything that is fatty besides coconuts and palms, and we know those aren't problems anyways. Well, coconut anyways.

I think it's ridiculous to think that we only scavenged. That's a personal opinion, but humans had modern levels of intelligence for at LEAST the past 50,000 years. They knew how to hunt in bands, how to defend a kill, and of course when to abandon a kill. I would expect there to be a bit of everything going on. It is even reasonable to expect that a certain amount of larger kills was left behind to feed predators so that the humans could make off with the meat they wanted more easily. In addition to that, consider that a fair amount of clothing was made from animal skins. It's hard to make clothing from a skin if you don't have the time to prepare it, and it's no small task to take the skin off of a kill. Especially when all you have are stone tools. The time that takes is easily enough to tear up a kill and take what is needed. I find it hard to believe that we survived for so long if we were so handicapped that we had to resort to scavenging for the majority of our meat AND that this led to us getting virtually no muscle meat. That doesn't fit with what has been discovered so far... it is much more probable that there was a pretty good mix of things happening.

Having said all that, there's nothing that would keep us from getting a ton of calories from fat and being healthy. Palmitic acid levels would have been incredibly low and all the fat would have been close to 1:1 omega 3 to 6 since there were no grain-fed animal farms. People would still have eaten leafy vegetables unless there was literally nothing available, and outside of the very northernmost bands of humans that was no the case, and even then you'd have them seasonally in most places.

Nuts are not good wild sources of food, they take longer to prepare than meat and often take as much energy to harvest, open and eat as they give. They would have been in the diet, but would not have been a large percentage. Go live in the woods for a few weeks and see what you end up eating. You'll eat grubs, plants, and when you can snare animals you'll have some meat. If you have a gun you'll maybe snag some bigger game, but you'll end up getting sick of just eating meat. You will want plant matter. It's strange, but it happens. I'm not saying you'll stop eating the meat, but you will end up eating quite a bit of plants and roots and depending on them for energy because you just won't have much else on AS regular of a basis.

Whether the overall percentage of fats and carbs is high or low, the vegetables are pretty much always there. As long as they are there the fats vs carbs is almost a moot point: it doesn't matter. All you have to do is make sure you're not getting the fats we KNOW cause problems (palmitic acid specifically, and of course the hydrogenated fats) and you will be fine.

I will definitely check out the book, I expect it will make a lot of sense. Just remember that as long as certain fundamentals are in place the bigger numbers seem to be irrelevant. As long as you have lots of plant matter and avoid non-fruit or veggie fructose AND avoid hydrogenated fats and high levels of palmitic acid (which basically means avoiding grain fed meat products) you will essentially be in perfect health. High fat and high carb both work with those fundamentals. At that point it's just whatever you like more!

[RatioFitness]

It's already well known that macronutrient % was based on location, especially latitude. There is no single macro % in the diets of HG's.

[Joshua Naterman]

Yea, I mean that's what I would expect to see discovered since that's pretty much even more basic than common sense.

[Cole Dano]

Common Sense isn't that common!

[Josh Schmitter]

Haven't posted in a blue moon...or since Venus was a comet that grazed the atmosphere and rained disaster on the Earth. One of those two...anyway, I finally have something to contribute

http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/20 ... antic.html

[Larry Roseman]

As long as you have lots of plant matter and avoid non-fruit or veggie fructose AND avoid hydrogenated fats and high levels of palmitic acid (which basically means avoiding grain fed meat products) you will essentially be in perfect health. High fat and high carb both work with those fundamentals. At that point it's just whatever you like more!

Haven't read this book either. I guess you can't always judge a book by it's cover :wink:

Also, I never heard of the palmitic acid problem before. Did a bit of quick reading. I'm not sure I'd be concerned about it

in grain fed beef relative to grass-fed. THe difference appears relatively small - for example 20g vs 18g per 100g meat. See http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/10/table/T1. Probably just selecting a leaner cut would reduce the actual quantify more than choosing a grass-fed but fattier cut.

I would certainly like to try a grass fed steak though - don't believe I've had one and hear it tastes fantastic :!:

[Joshua Naterman]

I agree, in most popular cuts of beef there isn't a MASSIVE difference, but it's still something to consider. The most important thing by far is the omega 3 to 6 ratio, which is virtually ideal in grass fed beef and total crap in grain fed.