Diet Linkfest

Modern Day Flintstones: A Stone Age Subculture Takes Shape in the US (Spiegel Online)

The Paleo Lifestyle: The Way, Way, Way Back (NYTimes)

The caveman dilemma: Why we take such lousy care of ourselves and our planet (Grist)

During the Paleolithic, people didn’t exercise because they wanted to, they exercised because they had to. So being lazy, which we consider one of the cardinal sins — I mean, only a farmer would come up with that definition, right? A hunter-gatherer would say that being lazy is a good thing. It means that you save energy. When you have an escalator next to a stairway — it is a Paleolithic instinct that gets you on the escalator rather than taking the stairs.

And we evolved to store as much fat as possible. That’s because most hunter-gatherers live at the margin of energy balance, right? They get just enough calories to pay for their bodies. And when they have a surplus, they use it to store on a little extra weight, for the inevitable times when there is not a surplus.

The Evolution of Diet (National Geographic)

Paleo Diet and Fire (Social Evolution Forum)

How the American diet has failed (Washington Post)

A reversal on carbs (LA Times)

Why Carbs May Cause Food Cravings (Live Science)

Why eating like we did 20,000 years ago may be the way of the future (io9)

Why you should probably stop eating wheat (io9)

The Rules of Good Nutrition (That Absolutely Everybody Agrees On) Must Read.

The health benefit all fad diets have in common (The Week)

As it turns out, these diets all generally improve the health of participants because they encourage people to avoid processed foods and consume more plants. Whether people take the meat-heavy Paleo route, opt for low-carb options, or go full-on vegetarian, the common benefits are the same.

Why you should starve yourself a little bit each day (io9)

Forget The 5:2 Diet! Here's Why Every Other Day Dieting Is Key To Weight Loss (HuffPo)

Weight-loss shocker: Diet books are lying to you (Salon)

All of these weight-loss diet books invariably claim to have discovered the secret of what types of foods or nutrients to eat or avoid for effective weight loss, or when to eat to them. Yet despite the apparent differences between them, virtually all weight-loss diet books have one thing in common. These books promote a diet primarily consisting of good quality and minimally-processed foods—or “real foods”—and they advise their readers to greatly reduce their consumption of poor-quality and highly-processed foods, sweets and beverages.

Much of the polemic in these books is in fact directed against the highly processed foods that now dominate the modern food supply. These are foods that have often been highly refined, reconstituted, and degraded during processing, and have many refined, extracted and fabricated ingredients added to them. These diet books potentially play an important role in increasing our understanding of how foods are produced or processed, and the potential health effects of these production techniques, thereby enhancing what I call our food-quality literacy.

Sweden Becomes First Western Nation to Reject Low-fat Diet Dogma in Favor of Low-carb High-fat Nutrition (Health Impact News)