hi and welcome back to my channel if you are just joining me for the first time welcome my name is dr. Megan I am a board-certified physician in internal medicine and I like to take an evidence-based approach to health and wellness topics so before we get started subscribe if you want hit the like button if you want and let's get into it so the topic for today comes from Heather who asked me if I could talk a little bit about the evidence with regards to the Paleo diet so Thank You Heather I've been working my way through viewer questions and I really appreciate all your great suggestions so what is the Paleo diet I'm sure many of you probably know by now but I'll give you the two-second synopsis and there are many different strains of it but in a nutshell the goal is to mimic the hunter-gatherer diet of thousands and thousands of years ago with the thought that our current agricultural based diet is a source of many diseases in our current everyday life and the focus is more on increased protein 20 to 35 percent of the meal generally comes from protein increased intake of non-starchy fruits and vegetables increased intake of unsaturated fat that's fats from plants and decreased amounts of salt sugar processed foods grains and legumes those are very very restrictive completely restricted depending on how strictly you followed the diet instead the goal is to focus on groceries meat fish eggs fruit and vegetables of the non-starchy variety nuts and seeds and plant-based oils and fat so what is the evidence for the Paleo diet so this diet is newer as opposed to other diets such as the Mediterranean diet that we've been looking at for quite a number of years but there is a small body of evidence with regards to the Paleolithic diet and I'll just go through a couple some of the more salient studies here I will always this my references down below so some small studies that I thought were interesting one was had about 24 subjects and found that subjects on the Paleo diet had better blood sugar cholesterol and insulin sensitivity than patients on a diabetic diet now these were all died subjects and then another another study with about 13 subjects had them eat strictly Paleo diet for three months followed by a strictly diabetic diet for three months or vice versa and the subjects had increased satiety weight loss and better blood sugar on the Paleo diet but that it was a bit harder to stick to than the diabetic diet a review looking at four randomized controlled trials evaluating the Paleo diet versus diet based more on national nutrition guidelines found that there were increased short-term improvements in these subjects who are on the Paleo diet in terms of their waist size triglycerides their HDL cholesterol that's your good cholesterol blood pressure and blood sugar than patients on the more conventional diet a cross-sectional study of over 600 subjects found that there may be an association between paleo diets and Mediterranean diets and lower markers of inflammation and a cohort study of over 2,000 subjects found that the Paleolithic diet and the Mediterranean diet may be inversely linked to mortality including cancer related mortality and cardiovascular related mortality now it's important to note that with these last two studies they're not randomized controlled trials so we cannot say that there is a cause and effect there but they do bring up interesting questions with regards to the relationship between the diets and health so what are the pros and cons of a Paleolithic diet well obviously there's a limited body of evidence but I think that any diet that asks people to eat more fruits and vegetables more nuts and seeds focuses more on unsaturated fat and animal fat and requests that people eat humanely raised meats is a great place to start and I have a lot of patients who've tried the Paleo diet and absolutely loved it the cons in my opinion I think it is quite restrictive some flavors of the Paleo diet introduced like an 80/20 or an 85/15 rule in which you know 50 to 25 15 to 20 percent of your meals can be non paleo you know I think the whole cutting out all grains and legumes that's pretty hard and you're not also getting a lot of dairy either so you want to make sure that you're getting calcium from somewhere with regards to the actual accuracy of the Paleolithic diet I would refer you to a great TED talk by dr. Christine and Warner which I will list down below she did her PhD in archaeology at Harvard she's now professor of archaeology at Oklahoma University and the overlap between what our ancestors ate and what the Paleo diet of today is is pretty slim so I encourage you to check that out it's a really good talk overall what it comes down for me is how sustainable the diet is for you and I always tell my patients that if they can't see themselves eating the same way when they're 80 then it may be time to tweak things a little bit to avoid a lot of frustration in the future another thing that I think is important to remember when we're looking at diets is it's really important to look at your relationship with food and I'm taking a page out of Michael Pollan books here as well if you look at people in France people in Italy people in Japan all many different cultures all over the world where they have a very different relationship with their food and they don't have a lot of the health problems in terms of healthy weight and eating habits that we have here in America and I think a lot of that comes down to our personal relationship with food and also the cultural relationship with food and that's really an important thing to look at when you're evaluating diets as well so that's gonna do it for today thank you so much for watching if there's an article in a peer-reviewed journal that you think I missed I would love to hear about it if you'd like me to do more kind of evaluation of diets or different fitness routines I would love to hear about that as well again thank you so much for watching my references will be listed down below and please be well .
Video Description:
Just about everyone has heard about the Paleo Diet by now, but what does the research say with regards to its efficacy? I was surprised! Keep watching to find out...
Tedx Talk: Debunking The Paleo Diet by Dr. Christina Warinner PhD
REFERENCES:
Jonsson T, Granfeldt Y, Lindeberg S, Hallberg AC. Subjective satiety and other experiences of a Paleolithic diet compared to a diabetes diet in patients with type 2 diabetes. Nutr J. 2013;12:105.
Manheimer EW, van Zuuren EJ, Fedorowicz A, Pijl H. Paleolithic nutrition for metabolic syndrome: systematic review and meta-analysis. Am J Clin Nutr. 2015;102(4):922-32.
Masharani U, Sherchan P, Schloetter M, Stratford S, Xiao A, Sebastian A, Nolte Kennedy M, Frassetto L. Metabolic and physiologic effects from consuming a hunter-gatherer (Paleolithic)-type diet in type 2 diabetes. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2015;69(8):944-8.
Whalen KA, Judd S, McCullough ML, Flanders WD, Hartman TJ, Bostick RM. Paleolithic and Mediterranean diet pattern scores are inversely associated with all-cause and cause-specific mortality in adults. J Nutr. 2017;147(4):612-20.
Whalen KA, McCullough ML, Flanders WD, Hartman TJ, Judd S, Bostick RM. Paleolithic and Mediterranean Diet pattern scores are inversely associated with biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative balance in adults. J Nutr. 2016;146(6):1217-26.
Please note that research is constantly changing. Every effort has been made to include the most current studies, however, since this publication there may be new research that was unable to be included in this video.
