Static Stretching and Refined Grain Intake by Paleo Man – Research Review
Taylor KL et. al. Negative effect of static stretching restored when combined with a sport specific warm-up component. J Sci Med Sport. (2009) 12(6):657-61.
There is substantial evidence that static stretching may inhibit performance in strength and power activities. However, most of this research has involved stretching routines dissimilar to those practiced by athletes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the decline in performance normally associated with static stretching pervades when the static stretching is conducted prior to a sport specific warm-up. Thirteen netball players completed two experimental warm-up conditions. Day 1 warm-up involved a submaximal run followed by 15 min of static stretching and a netball specific skill warm-up. Day 2 followed the same design; however, the static stretching was replaced with a 15 min dynamic warm-up routine to allow for a direct comparison between the static stretching and dynamic warm-up effects. Participants performed a countermovement vertical jump and 20m sprint after the first warm-up intervention (static or dynamic) and also after the netball specific skill warm-up. The static stretching condition resulted in significantly worse performance than the dynamic warm-up in vertical jump height (-4.2%, 0.40 ES) and 20m sprint time (1.4%, 0.34 ES) (p<0.05). However, no significant differences in either performance variable were evident when the skill-based warm-up was preceded by static stretching or a dynamic warm-up routine. This suggests that the practice of a subsequent high-intensity skill based warm-up restored the differences between the two warm-up interventions. Hence, if static stretching is to be included in the warm-up period, it is recommended that a period of high-intensity sport-specific skills based activity is included prior to the on-court/field performance.
My Comments: As I discussed recently in The Importance of Context, people these days seem to love them some absolutes and there tends to be no shortage of them to go around, especially when it comes to training. Always do this, never do that, you get the idea. The situational context is irrelevant, there are simply black and white absolutes that apply across the board.
And a recent never is that you should never ever static stretch before high-intensity training of any sort with endless coaches and gurus repeating that idea. And certainly this seems to be based on quite a body of research. A number of studies have shown that extensive static stretching done immediately prior to various types of exercise performance such as vertical jumping, sprinting and weightlifting impair strength and/or power output.
Now, as I mentioned in Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 1, even if static stretching does decrease strength and power outputs, there may still be times to do it before training. Usually this is in the case of a severe muscular tightness that impairs either technique or safety. In that context, proper technique and not hurting the person is far outweighed by any decrease in performance.
However, I made another point in that article which was this: many of the studies don’t really reflect how athletes typically go about their training. That is, anyone who has trained as an athlete or actually coached athletes in the real world knows that it’s fairly rare (especially among strength/power type athletes, endurance guys are often years behind the curve) to go straight from static stretching immediately into high-performance work. At the very least some type of drills are generally done between the two, usually more than that (e.g. multiple progressive intensity sports specific warm-ups) is done.
There is also an issue of the extent of stretching: many of the negative performance studies have used levels of static stretching that far exceed what most athletes would ever do in practice (again, something anyone who’s actually worked with athletes would know). That is, it would be rare to hold a stretch for 2-4 minutes in the real world, static stretching of perhaps 30 seconds per muscle group would be far more realistic. Yet it is generally that type of extremely prolonged static stretching that has been tested and found to impair performance (some studies have shown shorter stretching periods to have a similar negative impact).
Which brings us to today’s study which set to test the above in a more real-world type of situation.
The study examined 13 netball players from the Australian Institute of Sport. Both groups first performed a sub-maximal run as a general warm-up. Then one group performed static stretching (9 stretches held for 30 second each) and the other performed a dynamic warm-up consisting of 16 rather common dynamic movements. Both the static and dynamic warm-ups lasted 15 minutes. After a short-rest, both groups were tested on 20m sprint and vertical jump. Then both groups performed a netball specific skill warm-up consisting of various short sprints, shuffling, accelerations, direction changes and jumping. Then the performance tests were performed a second time to see if anything had changed.
And the results? Well, in keeping with previous work, the static stretching routine did in fact hurt performance on the 20 m sprint and vertical jumping compared to the dynamic warm-up. However, after performing the specific skills warm-ups described above, results were no different on the second set of performance tests. That is, any loss of performance due to static stretching was eliminated simply by performing a variety of sport specific skills prior to the maximal effort testing.
Basically, by testing the athletes in a situation that more accurately reflects how athletes actually train, they found that much of the concern over static stretching is unfounded. As they state in the discussion:
The results suggest that if an inhibitory effect was present after static stretching, that the SKILL component of the warm-up routine was able to dissipate the negative effect. This supports the suggestion by Young and Behm that practice attempts of the required tests may offset potential negative effects of static stretching.
The also note that their results are in contrast to another study examining both a dynamic performance warm-up and a static-stretching warm-up but in that study, the static stretching was done after the performance warm-up and immediately prior to the testing. Basically, order of warm-up matters which I also discussed in Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 1. And so long as it’s followed by some sort of dynamic, skill specific, progressive warm-up (e.g. progressively heavier warm-up sets in the weight room, increasingly faster pickups in sprinting, etc), static stretching appears to not be quite the absolute no-no that many have made it out to be.
Quoting from the researchers conclusions:
The most important findings from this study were that a dynamic warm-up routine is superior to static stretching when preparing for powerful performance; however, these differences can be eliminated if followed by a moderate to high intensity sport specific skill warm-up.
Summing Up: Basically, static stretching is only a problem if it’s done too extensively (e.g. stretches held for very extended periods) and is not followed by appropriate sport-specific warm-ups between the end of static stretching and maximal performance (testing or training). Which isn’t how real athletes generally train anyhow. Which is something any performance coach who has actually worked with athletes should know anyhow.
Mercader J. Mozambican grass seed consumption during the middle stone age. Science. (2009) 326(5960):1680-3.
The role of starchy plants in early hominin diets and when the culinary processing of starches began have been difficult to track archaeologically. Seed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time. A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age stone tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.
My Comments: In recent years, there has been quite an explosion in interest in the supposed diet of our paleolithic ancestors, essentially in an attempt to explain part of why humans are having so much trouble with the modern diet. So far as I can tell the first paper was written in the Mid-80′s or so but even more recently it’s become quite the fad/cult/area of interest for a lot of people.
Now, while an entire article could be written about this, it’s important to note that nobody knows for sure what we ate during our evolution. Even researchers in the field (Cordain and Eaton are two of the major ones) have arrived at rather drastically different conclusions about what our diets contained based on their assumptions because it’s all basically a lot of guesswork. We end up with estimations based on a bunch of assumptions and not much more.
Much of it comes from an analysis of a book called the Ethnographic Atlas, a work done years ago by non-scientists who wrote down (sort-of) what extant non-modernized people were eating. From that, various researchers, making various assumptions about the relative proportions of animal and vegetable foods in the diet have thrown out some ideas about what our evolutionary diet contained. Those researchers have often reached utterly differing ideas based on which built-in assumptions they started with. Other suggestions about our ancestral diet have been made by examining the current intake of extant hunter-gatherer tribes with the implicit assumption that their food intake is representative of our intake during our evolution.
I’d note that it’s unlikely that there was any singular evolutionary diet in the first place. Humans have shown the ability to adjust to all but the most extreme environments and show an amazing ability to adapt to drastically differing diets as well. Human ancestors evolving in say Alaska would have had far different foods available than someone living in the arid plains in Africa. Even examining the extant hunter-gatherer tribes demonstrates this in spades: the diet of an Alaskan Inuit is radically different from say an African Bushman simply due to the difference in environment and what is available to them. So there is no single ancestral diet in terms of the quantities, proportions or types of food that would have been eaten in the first place.
At best we can probably say with some degree of certainty that our ancestors didn’t have many of the foods available to us today. That is, Cap’n Crunch, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and Bud Light weren’t part of our evolutionary diet because they didn’t exist (much to the loss of our ancestors). Beyond that, we can’t say with much certainty what they did eat; it’s mostly guessing because folks weren’t alive to say for sure. And while it may be safe to assume that extant hunter-gatherer tribes are representative, it’s still an assumption.
Now, while there are many different interpretations to the ‘paleo-diet’ craze, at least one thing that most seem to agree on was that refined grains were absolutely not part of the evolutionary diet. Bloggers, apparently unclear on the concept of irony, go on constantly about how ‘Paleo man didn’t have grains, so you shouldn’t eat them.’ Apparently that same logic doesn’t apply to the computers they use to blog with, the Internet that they blog on, their Blackberries that they use to Twitter about their blog updates, modern cars that they use to get to work or the houses they live in. Paleo man didn’t have those either but I don’t see these folks giving those up. Guess they only want to give up the easy stuff when it’s convenient. But I digress.
That is, it’s generally assumed that refined grains (being currently blamed for much of modern health problems) weren’t a major part of our diet until the agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago. It’s also assumed that that span of time is insufficient for man to have evolved to deal with them. I’ll only address this second assumption by pointing readers to a new book called The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution wherein the authors make a rather good argument that, contrary to common belief, not only did human evolution continue once humans became civilized, that it accelerated.
Rather, in looking at today’s second paper, I want to address that first assumption: that our evolutionary diet was devoid of any type of refined cereal grain. I imagine that, if you’ve read this far, you can guess what I’m going to say about it and what the second study concluded.
The researchers were examining cave artifacts in a cave site in Mozambique which have been dated to somewhere between 42000 and 105,000 years ago. They mention that excavation in 2007 retrieved 555 artifacts. Of those, 70 stone tools were analyzed and were chosen to represent the broadest range of potential plant uses. This includes scrapers, grinders, points, flakes and miscellaneous tools. These were analyzed and while 20% contained no starch residue, the other 80% were found to contain starch granules with the number on each tool ranging from 1 to 650. It’s worth noting that the quantity of granules found on the scrapers was massively larger than what is found naturally in the cave, that is, they were brought into the cave.
The majority of starch granules (89%) were identified as sorghum, a grass showing a large complex of cultivated, wild and weedy types. The researchers note that the starch granules found on the tools analyzed are structurally identical to modern sorghum plants. As the researchers state:
The Mozambican data show that Middle Stone Age groups routinely brought starchy plants to their cave sites and that starch granules go attached to and preserved on stone tools. I cannot prove that starch from all stone tools represents direct tool function…These early grinders are simply modified cobbles and core tools, with a suspected use that conforms to the technological action of “diffuse resting percussion” and “pounding”, which allows the grinding of plant materials.
Put differently, while more research will certainly be needed to verify or refute this claim, data that is a bit more direct than “Assumptions based on a book some guys wrote years and years ago” suggest that as far back as 100,000 years ago, humans had found a way to refine and consume at least some grains for their diet. Or as the researchers state more directly in the abstract above:
A large assembly of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo Sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.
And even if you don’t buy the argument of the book I referenced above, that 10,000 years is more than sufficient to allow adaptation to changes in diet, it would be hard to argue that 105,000 years isn’t time enough to adapt to some degree.
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I’m by no means “paleo”, but I think they have a point, albeit my interpretation is a little less extreme. While 10,000 years may be enough to adapt to grains, a few generations to adapt to Wonder bread, Doritos, and Twinkies isn’t. Although the refined carbs aren’t the only part of the equation there, so sorry for the hyperbole.
Also, thanks for the laugh about paleo bloggers.
Much of the talk about Paloe man is guesswork which some fitness gurus on the internet are using to gain popularity. The bottom line is pretty obvious – modern living makes people spend less energy for living and provides some many food choices and temptations that most people end up over eating.
However the closest thing to paleo man are tribal people who live deep in amazon or africa or asia. They are also closest to ‘hunters and gatherers’ that we may ever know.
Most of them I’ve seen in documentaries have muscular physiques with very low fat levels providing proof for some of the basics of eating:
1) Restricted calories ( Not easy to eat off the land)
2) Calorie partitioning and/or IFing: Eating better some days and worse on other days
3) High protein
4) Nutrition partitioning: usually consuming meals after hard days work and fast
4) Good sleep (without tv or electricity)
5) Active lifestyle (day long search for food
This post was long overdue, IMO! I thought much the same about the modern amenities everyone can’t do without, though the Paleo lifestyle is largely splendid. I prefer a lifestyle I call Paleoid.
Lyle I think youve set up a bit of straw man to knock down in your criticisms of the paleo diet. Its agreed by many paleo dieters that paleo man thrived on many a differing macronutrient level and on widely varying food types, so there’s no disagreement there. Neither surely there is much contradiction between using a labtop and modern luxeries while advocating a diet they hold to be best suited to our genetics. I dont know if you meant this as a serious point, a cheap shot or just a joke.
As you say yourself its a fairly safe assumption that current hunter gatherer diets are a pretty close proximate for a paleo diet. And while grains are a factor in modern hunter gatherer diets today in times of scarcity the vast bulk of those diets consist of meat, veg, fruit and nuts. Personally I think a large percentage of the benefit of the hunter gatherer diet comes from a lack of gluten and sugar and the health benefits associated with a calorie restricted food intake. The Okinawan diet showing that one can consume a fairly large amount of carbs, a bunch of that coming from grains in the form of rice and still trive.
Really enjoy the blog.
Kevin
Pray tel what adaptations to Doritos, etc. would have to occur. The problem is eating TOO MUCH food in the face of TOO LITTLE ACTIVITY. Not the fact that Doritos are refined grains. It’s simply too calorically dense for a culture that sits on its ass all day.
Paleo man also had to spend hours obtaining food which drasticaly raised energy expenditure. Now we go to the grocery store in our cars. Paleo man didn’t have Whole Foods or Wild Oats to get grass fed beef either, and I don’t see the paleo folks giving that up either.
Lyle
I want to be a little provocative on purpose but I don’t think the distinction between static and dynamic stretching is particularly useful. There’s just stretching, which is applying a force to the muscle in an effort to elongate it. What most people call static stretching is really just putting oneself into a position to apply maximum leverage to a muscle in usually a very unnatural way whereas dynamic stretching is simply using more natural movements to stretch the muscle (and is very often confused with a warmup).
Static stretching has been used for many, many years because it is simply the best way to generate a lot of force on certain muscles. The real problem has never been static stretching per se but over-stretching. A two-second static stretch is not going to impact performance whatsoever whereas a 3 minute pretzel hold with your legs bent backwards like a chinese acrobat obviously will (and every athlete knows this without having to be told) . Thus dynamic stretching is now the rage primarily because it does not put a person in a position to easily abuse the leverage provided by a static stretch and thus it is harder to over-stretch. That doesn’t mean that some situations don’t call for static stretching, even prior to performance.
It’s sort of similar to the Doritos debate. The problem with modern food as you pointed out is not that we have somehow invented a dangerous macronutrient that didn’t exist before. It’s that our technology to produce easily digestible food and provide it to the masses (in the developed world at least) has reversed mankind’s million-year battle against hunger by making it, for the first time in history, easy for the average guy to overeat.
Thus, the problem with static stretching and doritos is that they are easy to abuse. You can put me in the radical camp against over-stretching and over-eating. The rest of the debate is just about tools that can be used properly or not depending upon the context, and neither is inherently bad or good.
I think the stab at Paleo bloggers is a bit irrational. They’re not trying to BE cavemen, simply trying to eat the kinds of foods humans evolved consuming, in order to optimize health. Granted, spending hours every day on computers and such, would take away from your physical activity, but as long as you continue to live an active lifestyle, I see no reason why a little time spent on technology like computers, cell phones, etc would interfere with health.
Also, although grains may have been present in some paleolithic peoples’ diets, I don’t think there has been any evidence that it was in widespread use. Either way, grains still contain some aspects that we would preferably avoid, such as lectins, phytates, gluten, and a rather high glycemic load when processed.
Nice Post, I think both the no static stretching and paleo orthodoxies have it coming. I stretch my soleus, hamstring and hip flexor before a squat because without the increased flexibility I can not attain and consistently mantain the optimal positions its really a no brainer to me which is more important.
As far as Paleo Diet, I think the paleo diet helps allot of people eat a diet composed of whole foods and lacking allot of possible problem items in their diet so its great that way. The central assumption behind it that we are unchanged biologically since paleolithic times clearly false. I think we need to think not of paleo diet and fitness but of evolutionary approaches to diet and fitness.
Which brings my to the one disagreement. I really don’t think that it is just calories in vs calories out, the effect of the food hormonally and the the interplay between food, chemicals, human and gastrointestinally microflora are all key to understanding weight loss and why obesity is such a huge problem. Hunter foragers do not have to work as hard nor are they as close to starving as people often think, they do experience periods of low activity and high calorie intake and do not add fat beyond a certain point this seems to be true of most traditional diets and lifestyles eating to much and not being active enough are certainly part of the problem but I don’t think they’re the whole problem.
Its also key to understand that different populations have different adaptions Rice may be great part of diet for people with regions with histories of grain consumption and utterly not from people from regions without that history and sometimes history can back fire and gluten grains maybe problematic for many percisely because of the fact we have adapted to agricultural evolution is paradoxical that way. http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/10/agriculture_produced_its_own_b.php
I generally really appreciate your posts, but I don’t understand this paleo bashing. While our household is hardly paleo (we include grains and dairy some of the time), I think the paleo approach is a good general guideline for living and eating healthier and can really help people who are having trouble with bad eating and exercise habits. As such, I think it deserves better than ridicule.
If there are starch granules on the stone age tools, does this mean that grains were a significant part of their diet? Maybe, maybe not. Considering how susceptible starches are to bacterial degradation (as opposed to DNA which is pretty stable), I find it hard to believe this result at all, but not being a paleontologist and not having read this paper, I will give them the benefit of the doubt. At best it suggests that people would have eaten any food sources available, including grains on occasion, but I doubt these grains would have been abundant enough for people to overeat in the way that modern humans routinely do. As for “adapting” to grains, it’s clear that many people have not adapted, unless you consider having chronic diarrhea, allergies and nutritional deficiencies as being adapted. It’s possible that some people have adapted, while others have not, just as some people adapted to low sunlight intensities away from the equator by reducing skin pigment. That may just suggest that vitamin D deficiency is more quickly fatal (and therefore more important evolutionarily). It’s not at all clear that tolerating a high carbohydrate intake falls into the category of being adapted. After all, many people seem to do quite well on a higher carb diet (with or without grains), at least long enough to reproduce. Later in life, these same people don’t fare as well and may experience uncontrollable weight gain or develop diabetes and other metabolic disturbances such as hyperlipidemia, even if they haven’t become obese. There are too many people attempting to lead healthy lives while eating lots of grains and failing miserably for me to believe that humans can be considered to be adapted to grain eating, at least as a large proportion of their food intake.
Timely. This was in my email this morning, Cordain’s response to the 100k year grain issue.
Before I quote it, however, and while I practice a 90% “paleo” diet (some dairy a little “junk” now and then) and it has worked wonders for me effortlessly (60 pounds weight loss & counting), I must say that I strongly agree with Lyle when he says:
“I’d note that it’s unlikely that there was any singular evolutionary diet in the first place. Humans have shown the ability to adjust to all but the most extreme environments and show an amazing ability to adapt to drastically differing diets as well. Human ancestors evolving in say Alaska would have had far different foods available than someone living in the arid plains in Africa. Even examining the extant hunter-gatherer tribes demonstrates this in spades: the diet of an Alaskan Inuit is radically different from say an African Bushman simply due to the difference in environment and what is available to them. So there is no single ancestral diet in terms of the quantities, proportions or types of food that would have been eaten in the first place.”
I often point out to people that “paleo” is anything from a Kitavan diet of 70% carbs to an Inuit diet of 80% animal fat, and everything in-between. If you want to practice paleo, then find what works for you within that range. For me, about 70/20/10 fat/protein/carb seems to work best, but I also do potatoes and other dense starches now and then. And sometimes I do almost zero carbs for a few days at a time. And I fast randomly and intermittently and work out fasted. The other side of the paleo equation is that we went hungry sometimes.
Anyway, Cordain:
Dear Richard,
Dr. Cordain was recently asked to comment on the articles
entitled “Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the
Middle Stone Age” by Julio Mercader in the journal Science,
and “Humans feasting on grains for at least 100,000 years,”
by Katherine Harmon Scientific American. Both articles cite
evidence that humans consumed grain much earlier than was
previously thought.
Dr. Cordain’s response:
This is an interesting paper ( Mercader J. Mozambican grass
seed consumption during the middle stone age. Science
2009;326:1680-83) as it may push probable (but clearly not
definite) cereal grain consumption by hominins back to at least
105,000 years ago. Prior to this evidence, the earliest
exploitation of wild cereal grains was reported by Piperno
and colleagues at Ohalo II in Israel and dating to ~23,500
years ago (Nature 2004;430:670-73). As opposed to the Ohalo
II data in which a large saddle stone was discovered with
obvious repetitive grinding marks and embedded starch granules
attributed to a variety of grains and seeds that were
concurrently present with the artifact , the data from
Ngalue is less convincing for the use of cereal grains
as seasonal food. No associated intact grass seeds have been
discovered in the cave at Ngalue, nor were anvil stones
with repetitive grinding marks found. Hence, at best,
the data suggests sporadic use (and not necessarily
consumption) of grains at this early date. Clearly, large
scale processing of sorghum for consumption for extended
periods seems unlikely.
Further, It should be pointed out that consumption of wild
grass seeds of any kind requires extensive technology and
processing to yield a digestible and edible food that likely
did not exist 105,000 years ago. Harvesting of wild
grass seeds without some kind of technology (e.g.
sickles and scythes [not present at this time]) is
tedious and difficult at best. Additionally, containers
of some sort (baskets [not present at this time], pottery
[not present] or animal skin containers are needed to
collect the tiny grains. Many grain species require
flailing to separate the seed from the chaff and then
further winnowing ([baskets not present]), or animal
skins] to separate the seeds from the chaff. Intact
grains are not digestible by humans unless they are
first ground into a flour (which breaks down the cell
walls), and then cooked (typically in water – e.g.
boiling [technology not present]) or parched in a
fire which gelatinizes the starch granules, and thereby
makes them available for digestion and absorption. Because
each and every one of these processing steps requires
additional energy on the part of the gatherer, most
contemporary hunter gatherers did not exploit grains
except as starvation foods because they yielded such
little energy relative to the energy obtained (optimal
foraging theory).
If indeed the grinder/core axes with telltale starch
granules were used to make flour from sorghum seeds,
then the flour still had to be cooked to gelatinize the
starch granules to make it digestible. In Neolithic
peoples, grass seed flour most typically is mixed with
water to make a paste (dough) that is then cooked into flat
breads. It is highly unlikely that the technology or the
behavioral sophistication existed 105,000 years ago to
make flat breads. Whole grains can be parched intact
in fires, but this process is less effective than making
flour into a paste and cooking it to gelatinize the starch
granules. Hence, it is difficult to reconcile the chain of
events proposed by the authors (appearance of sorghum starch
granules on cobbles or grinders = pounding or grinding of
sorghum grains = consumption of sorghum). I wouldn’t hang
my hat on this evidence indicating grains were necessarily
consumed by hominins at this early date. To my mind, the
Ohalo II data still represents the best earliest evidence
for grain consumption by hominins.
Cordially,
Loren Cordain, Ph.D., Professor
“There are too many people attempting to lead healthy lives while eating lots of grains and failing miserably”
By “too many people,” do you mean affluent westerners? Because the rest of the world relies on grains to survive.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/U8480E/U8480E07.htm#Proportions%20of%20food%20in%20average%20diets
Not just westerners, though plenty of westerners try (and fail) to stay optimally healthy eating whole grains, low fat diets. See ftp://ftp.fao.org/es/esn/nutrition/ouagafinal.pdf (see fig. 7) Africans are seeing the results of stuffing themselves with grains (increasing wheat, rice and other cereals) in the absence of nutrient dense animal foods and inadequate fruits and vegetables. Calories have increased due to increased grains (at the expense of traditional foods including tubers), but health has not improved, quite the opposite. There is stark obesity coinciding with underweight, anemia and vitamin and mineral deficiencies. People can survive temporarily on such diets, but long term health suffers.
I’m not convinced that all grains are bad all the time, but I think they should be limited. We find the easiest thing is just to avoid them most of the time.
Oh, and Happy Holidays!
Paleo man ate that way because that was all he had. Twigs and grass. Im sure if paleo man had a sammich he would eat it.
While I appreciate the anti-fanaticism driver behind the paleo-critique, the blogger “irony” point is just silly. You do a cost-benefit analysis of new vs old methods/tech, etc., and choose the things that come out positive and minimize the negative effects. The paleo-bloggers probably make a point of looking up from their computer screens once every 20 minutes to decrease the nearpoint stress on their eyes, another evolutionary adaptation that is lagging behind our technology/lifestyle.
This also goes against your general bent against the all-or-nothing philosophy. Yes, paleo man probably ate everything, including grains when he could get them. But because he didn’t farm starch, it’s highly unlikely that he ate wheat/rice/sorghum etc. in the sorts of ratios that we moderns do.
Obviously, the world couldn’t sustain 6 billion people living on a paleo diet, but if you’re looking from a selfish perspective of your own health, then (starting from a baseline of the average/mainstream diet) fewer grains are probably a good thing.
I eat bread, cakes (it’s Christmas, after all!), dumplings when I’m with my Slovak family, beer with my friends, rice with my sushi, etc — I just eat less of them all, more steak, more veggies. The paleo idea is good. Fanaticism of all sorts is usually a refuge of the stupid.
@Scott: Sammiches are good.
Lyle, not all health problems are caused from eating a surplus of calories. You said “the problem” is from eating too much and exercising too little. That’s not the root cause for a host of modern degenerative diseases.
Interesting article. Paleo eating is definitely becoming big and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I agree that all we can do is speculate what food they ate, I’m sure they ate anything they possibly could. However,I am 100% convinced that we (modern humans) eat way to many highly processed grains and it is the cause to most of our health problems. We can’t deny the effects of eating high glycemic foods can we?
Lyle,
I always appreciate your writings and analysis. However, you missed one important issue. Modern grains grown in 2010 bear only a passing resemblance to grains from 10,000, 5,000, 2,000 and even 200 years ago. A good example of this are some of the heritage wheat varieties grown south of the SF bay by some small outfits. They are thought to be descended from the varieties brought by Spanish missionaries 2-300 years ago. They are only a small fraction of the size and have a much smaller % of gluten/protein content in comparison to standard 2010 varieties. In fact, the standard 2010 wheat is a whole lot different than what was commonly grown throughout the US as recently as the 1940′s and 50′s. The same can be said for other grain types.
You correctly point out that evolution has not stopped and may even have sped up in the last 10,000 years (lower levels of sexual dimorphism etc..). But we have to remember that when we talk about modern grains we are talking about a food that has not even been around for a century in its current forms.
“lylemcd on December 23rd, 2009 11:36 am
Pray tel what adaptations to Doritos, etc. would have to occur. The problem is eating TOO MUCH food in the face of TOO LITTLE ACTIVITY. Not the fact that Doritos are refined grains. It’s simply too calorically dense for a culture that sits on its ass all day.”
Durr hurr, how about an adaptive increase in BMR? Durka durka?
Cmon Lyle.
Why can’t Cordain just say:
“This paper does call into question my earlier ASSUMPTION AND GUESS that man did not eat grains earlier than 23k years ago. More research/data is necessary to establish a better idea of when grain consumption began. I will be revising my earlier materials about history of human grain consumption in light of these findings. I still BELIEVE that this grain consumption must have been minor 105k years ago, because I don’t THINK they had the technology to get much nutrition out of the grass seeds yet.”
You’re not allowed to only look for ways to discount pretty solid evidence just because it contradicts your earlier assumptions.
Interesting stuff… As what comes to thaiboxing and stretching I know for a fact that most of the top thai fighters do not much stretch if any at all before training or fighting. Regardless they can perform all kinds of explosive moves that require lot of flexibility. Compared to some other martial arts like taekwondo where stretching seems to be a much bigger part of the training this is kind of strange. In my own experience I’ve found out that both ways to train will make the athlete fast but where the thaiboxer usually has more power behind the kicks the taekwondokan usually can kick higher and control the movement easier… I dont know if this difference has anything to do with the stretching but for sure it relates to the kicking techics used.
Related to the grain article I just wanted to say that I’ve met many people who have made their life easier by minimizing grain foods in their diet. On the other hand I’ve also met some “lucky” people who thrive with grain based diet without any problem.