One thing about the 'ability to digest dairy' is that it's not a full-blown novel capability, which would take a very long time to evolve, I think.
All mammals have the ability to digest milk as infants.
What gave us milk-drinking superpowers was the *breaking* of the mechanism that turns off the ability to digest milk in adults. Which is a very easy thing to do and to spread, especially given its value to a culture that keeps cows.
It's a damn sight easier to go blind than to acquire eyes.
I think I mostly agree with you, except that I still think Paleo is basically a sane starting point for SAD people who want to experiment with diet.
The first time I tried Paleo AIP the result was astonishing. In a week my psoriasis was 99% gone, my brain fog was gone, my arthritis cleared up. It was magical. Then I got busy and stressy a few months later and fell off the wagon. I tried several times and was never able to replicate that initial experience, don't know why.
I had a very obese friend, did Paleo AIP for six months and the weight just dropped off her. Don't know how much she lost, but it was dramatic.
When my Dad does Paleo all his arthritis and peripheral neropathy goes away in about two weeks. He hates it so always stops after a few weeks, but he's repeated this experiment half a dozen times.
Interesting. I never saw anyone have big success with Paleo, but I suppose if you're in that group of "mostly still hunter gatherer" genetics it might be close to optimal for you.
Autoimmune Protocol. Paleo but without eggs, nuts, seeds, nightshades and dairy. Basically meat, vege and fruit.
I haven't done an ancestry test, kinda want to but I hate the idea of handing my genetics to a corporation that at some point is going to sell it to my insurance company who is then going to raise premiums because I have a genetic predisposition to hating insurance companies. 🤪
Same for genetics. One of them (23 and me?) is currently in talks of being bought a by a Chinese state sponsored biotech company.. what could possibly go wrong..
May 10·edited May 10Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
You probably have heard of the Yamnaya before, it's just that they used to be known as the Aryans, or more politely the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
And I believe that the Corded Ware people were previously known as the Battle-Axe Culture.
Of course it's more complicated that that... But as far as I can tell modern genetics is telling us that the bad old archaeologists/anthropologists of the 1920s were on to something, and the last hundred years of arc and anth has basically been a project to tell polite lies.
My own ancestors, however, were always known as the Beaker People, who despite their nice friendly name now appear to have pretty much depopulated the British Isles on arrival.
This post took me somewhere else: nutrigenomics. I thought it was Voodoo, but maybe based on our ancestry there are certain foods that may work best for one person, but not for another. Personalized nutrition makes sense if we see people succeeding with different diets. Maybe in a few years a DNA test will determine what is best for you.
DNA could help, but we could just probably try a few things now and just find out. "Dairy makes me feel terrible & gives me indigestion" isn't that difficult to try once :)
I am afraid we are a tiny minority, those willing to try, test, modify, study, repeat. I am thinking about scale: the general population will see a 40-second TickTok video promoting certain diet and will just go for it. If we want something sustainable and effective for most people, maybe a DNA sample and a personalized plan may actually work.
Even the "miracle" drugs (semaglutide, etc.) produce a 5% weight loss reduction in some and 20% in others. There ought to be an explanation based on how each individual is metabolizing stuff.
Yea we certainly need to find a way to "dumb it down" enough for busy people who just want the cliff notes. It's probably somewhat complicated but not crazy complicated.
Hoping we'll end up with some sort of flowchart: start here, do this, didn't work? do that, didn't work? do that. And people with more complex issues will have to go down further, but hopefully it'll eventually work for 95% of people.
I will take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite books: "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" https://amzn.to/4dwnRRY
It can be dry at times, but it actually DOES have a lot of fascinating tidbits for someone looking at it from a nutrition angle, as they monitor the teeth (nomads have no cavities, farmers do) and the midden bone ratios (did they eat horse, sheep, cow, dog, etc....) and also the words they used - for example, people that eat cows (or horses, or whatever) have (at least) 2 words for cows - cows that are alive and must be shepherded, and cow meat - steak/beef, etc.... People who don't just have one word, and since their Proto-Indo-European language infected everyone's words from Britain to South India, they could track it.
It's a sketch show they did together before Peep Show, it's often quite hilarious, the most famous is probably them playing SS soldiers wondering if they're "the baddies".
I really appreciate your musing here. It looks like we are all moving towards an understanding that the approach for undoing the damage from the western lifestyle and diet is dependent on context. Solutions like keto, carnivore, vegan, paleo etc. are highly imprecise and when they work that does not mean they are solution for everyone, forever, which seems to be the assumptions of their followers and promoters.
In reality processed food diets, pharmaceuticals, indoor lazy living, working behind screens, wearing unnatural clothes, pollution, not getting sunshine and eating foods grown and raised in unnatural conditions are most likely the problem. Going carnivore might be a good starting point for some, vegan for others, keto for others, but the end point has to be getting to a natural lifestyle.
I mean, to be fair, if you switched out the dairy fat for ruminant adipose tissue, you'd be doing a keto version of the megafauna-hunting-diet. But you have special asks of a diet -- keto for sleep and weight loss both. In terms of raw macros, your diet is further from Yamnaya than it is from an archaeologically-correct megafauna-hunting-diet: you're missing the 200 daily grams of lactose.
Paleo as I experienced it in the 2000s2010s was fairly high-protein, low-carb. People were still much more afraid of (saturated) fat than now, and Protein Power had come out somewhat recently. This was when almost nobody had even heard of keto. And I probably couldn't do this diet w/o the dairy fat - I've tried substituting beef suet and I just can't stomach it. Tbh not even stomach, it just makes me gag.
Certainly most people who tried Paleo were hoping for weight loss, so that one's not a super crazy demand.
Fair enough on all counts. I've done a kind of paleo for a while but it was for health, not weight loss (it didn't help my health lol).
I'm not sure I could do it with just animal fat. There's probably the problem of the impoverished microbiome, as well as genetic changes. You could do ex150fecaltransplant and find out.
Sure. But if you only eat animal fat, your microbiome will adapt to that and you'll just have exactly the bacteria needed to digest animal fat. This whole idea of "eat X food to improve your microbiome" seems so dumb to me. Why would I train my microbiome to eat foods I don't want to eat? Just in case I land on a lonely island and don't want to adapt the first 2 weeks there?
Oh, no you can't just pick up the gut flora from the food itself. Otherwise there'd be no lactose-intolerant people anywhere, or people who can't seem to digest beef, etc. Beyond your genome that you probably 40% inherited from pastoralists, you also inherited gut flora passed down from mother to child down the long ages. Your own inability to digest big greasy gobs of straight raw suet isn't a genetic disability, it's that we've all lost many of our microscopic internal farm animals. With time-traveling microbe transplants you could probably digest with little difficult much of what your pre-Yamnaya ancestors did.
Oh, and gut microbiome is why ruminants are safe to eat -- we've kept their microbiomes in better shape than our own.
I also bought into the anti-dairy paleo argument and went several years without it. I'm functioning much better now that I get about 60% of my calories from milk/butter/cream.
Maps showing the frequency of hereditary hemochromatosis look quite similar to those showing the frequency of lactase persistence. I'm looking forward to when it's possible to upload my genome to a site and be presented with a personalised diet.
I eat a lot of dairy and I think that I may be overdoing it. Could a problem stem from the vitamin A (that dairy could contain a lot of if you believe the low vitamin A crowd) content, calcium (wrt a calcium/magnesium balance) or salt that is added to cheese (see following paragraph)?
I'm interested in trying a low salt diet and I was currently wondering whether the paleo diet was including a recommandation about that? Were you eating a low salt diet during your paleo "experiment"?
Why a low salt diet (or maybe stated more correctly a low sodium/(potassium or other electrolytes) diet)? I believe it induces thirst and I want to drink as little water as I can (without it being stressful and I think lowered salt could make it far easier and less stressful). Why would I want to do that? Because it's possible that hyperosmolarity (but not when salt is increased) increases metabolism in case of lowered thyroid levels.
I don't recall how much salt I was using during my Paleo days, but it wasn't zero. I think I upped my salt intake when I went keto, as many ketoers recommend that and I really got into steak and salting helped draw the moisture out. Until I went no-added-salt in 2022.
Skimmed your thyroid post, and most of it is over my head heh. I don't think I have thyroid issues, I've always run hot & my lab markers seem fine & my metabolic rate is fine. So I haven't read much about it.
What makes you think you're overdoing the dairy? In my experience, cheese & yogurt are way too delicious. So I have to stay away from them, at least ad-lib. Cream & butter are amazing for me. Could be that there's something similar going on for you?
I have looked into the vA aspect of cream a bit, cause it contains a boatload. Grant Genereux says it might be ok cause the fat binds the retinol. But he still advised me not to consume so much cream. Didn't follow that advice haha, wish me luck ;)
I do like not adding salt. I never missed it for a day, seared meat in butter tastes just the same without salt. Steak is just fine, too. And feels like I'm not retaining as much water, am not bloated as much from that. Also my cramps almost entirely went away even when working out now, and I have fewer headaches. Headaches when trying to go carnivore was what first caused me to cut out salt and I never went back.
Same thing for me, I upped my salt when I tried the keto diet, but it stayed when I started eating carbs again.
I think I eat too much yogurt/butter/cream too. Cheese not so much these days. For the reasons evoked, i.e. especially the high calcium content (I do not eat necessarily a high magnesium diet) and the potential vA overload. I'm afraid of auto-immune diseases and I believe vitamin A might be involved (when someone tends not to excrete or metabolize what he "over-consume" and this could be my case).
Going to try this low sodium things, hopping it will fix my issues 🤞 I think it's easy to get used to as you say but might be difficult when you eat out (if you want to be very strict about it which is not necessarily my case). This is encouraging it gave you some results (on water retention and headaches) :)
Low fat AND high dairy is the bane of my diet. I need to go research and find a way to do low fat with dairy. At the end of most days my macros are 40-50% fat with 15-20% pro and 30-40% carb. Frustrating that low fat is so difficult.
One thing about the 'ability to digest dairy' is that it's not a full-blown novel capability, which would take a very long time to evolve, I think.
All mammals have the ability to digest milk as infants.
What gave us milk-drinking superpowers was the *breaking* of the mechanism that turns off the ability to digest milk in adults. Which is a very easy thing to do and to spread, especially given its value to a culture that keeps cows.
It's a damn sight easier to go blind than to acquire eyes.
Yes, that's a good point.
It would be neat to make a flow chart or decision tree for which kind of diet to try in the /r/SaturatedFat extended universe.
Yea, such a flow chart is kind of the endgame for my way of thinking about dieting. Great minds think alike ;)
I think I mostly agree with you, except that I still think Paleo is basically a sane starting point for SAD people who want to experiment with diet.
The first time I tried Paleo AIP the result was astonishing. In a week my psoriasis was 99% gone, my brain fog was gone, my arthritis cleared up. It was magical. Then I got busy and stressy a few months later and fell off the wagon. I tried several times and was never able to replicate that initial experience, don't know why.
I had a very obese friend, did Paleo AIP for six months and the weight just dropped off her. Don't know how much she lost, but it was dramatic.
When my Dad does Paleo all his arthritis and peripheral neropathy goes away in about two weeks. He hates it so always stops after a few weeks, but he's repeated this experiment half a dozen times.
What's AIP?
Interesting. I never saw anyone have big success with Paleo, but I suppose if you're in that group of "mostly still hunter gatherer" genetics it might be close to optimal for you.
Autoimmune Protocol. Paleo but without eggs, nuts, seeds, nightshades and dairy. Basically meat, vege and fruit.
I haven't done an ancestry test, kinda want to but I hate the idea of handing my genetics to a corporation that at some point is going to sell it to my insurance company who is then going to raise premiums because I have a genetic predisposition to hating insurance companies. 🤪
Same for genetics. One of them (23 and me?) is currently in talks of being bought a by a Chinese state sponsored biotech company.. what could possibly go wrong..
You probably have heard of the Yamnaya before, it's just that they used to be known as the Aryans, or more politely the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
And I believe that the Corded Ware people were previously known as the Battle-Axe Culture.
Of course it's more complicated that that... But as far as I can tell modern genetics is telling us that the bad old archaeologists/anthropologists of the 1920s were on to something, and the last hundred years of arc and anth has basically been a project to tell polite lies.
My own ancestors, however, were always known as the Beaker People, who despite their nice friendly name now appear to have pretty much depopulated the British Isles on arrival.
Haha so we all got tricked into thinking we couldn't eat dairy because of 1 crazy vegetarian? Nice.
I certainly would rather be called the Battle-Axe culture than the Corded-Ware culture :D
In fairness, depopulation seems to have been the default for a long time. People didn't like other people much.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the Nazis finally worked out that the Aryans were black people from Russia.
Well, Hitler did kill himself.. maybe that's the last telegram he got.
This post took me somewhere else: nutrigenomics. I thought it was Voodoo, but maybe based on our ancestry there are certain foods that may work best for one person, but not for another. Personalized nutrition makes sense if we see people succeeding with different diets. Maybe in a few years a DNA test will determine what is best for you.
DNA could help, but we could just probably try a few things now and just find out. "Dairy makes me feel terrible & gives me indigestion" isn't that difficult to try once :)
I am afraid we are a tiny minority, those willing to try, test, modify, study, repeat. I am thinking about scale: the general population will see a 40-second TickTok video promoting certain diet and will just go for it. If we want something sustainable and effective for most people, maybe a DNA sample and a personalized plan may actually work.
Even the "miracle" drugs (semaglutide, etc.) produce a 5% weight loss reduction in some and 20% in others. There ought to be an explanation based on how each individual is metabolizing stuff.
Yea we certainly need to find a way to "dumb it down" enough for busy people who just want the cliff notes. It's probably somewhat complicated but not crazy complicated.
Hoping we'll end up with some sort of flowchart: start here, do this, didn't work? do that, didn't work? do that. And people with more complex issues will have to go down further, but hopefully it'll eventually work for 95% of people.
I will take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite books: "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" https://amzn.to/4dwnRRY
It can be dry at times, but it actually DOES have a lot of fascinating tidbits for someone looking at it from a nutrition angle, as they monitor the teeth (nomads have no cavities, farmers do) and the midden bone ratios (did they eat horse, sheep, cow, dog, etc....) and also the words they used - for example, people that eat cows (or horses, or whatever) have (at least) 2 words for cows - cows that are alive and must be shepherded, and cow meat - steak/beef, etc.... People who don't just have one word, and since their Proto-Indo-European language infected everyone's words from Britain to South India, they could track it.
Even the Barbie movie made a reference to it.
I think I heard about the copper age during bronze orientation... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
lol it took me about a minute to realize the stone guys are the Peep Show guys lol
It's a sketch show they did together before Peep Show, it's often quite hilarious, the most famous is probably them playing SS soldiers wondering if they're "the baddies".
Oh I've seen that meme all over the place!
I really appreciate your musing here. It looks like we are all moving towards an understanding that the approach for undoing the damage from the western lifestyle and diet is dependent on context. Solutions like keto, carnivore, vegan, paleo etc. are highly imprecise and when they work that does not mean they are solution for everyone, forever, which seems to be the assumptions of their followers and promoters.
In reality processed food diets, pharmaceuticals, indoor lazy living, working behind screens, wearing unnatural clothes, pollution, not getting sunshine and eating foods grown and raised in unnatural conditions are most likely the problem. Going carnivore might be a good starting point for some, vegan for others, keto for others, but the end point has to be getting to a natural lifestyle.
Yea it certainly seems that the "simple ideas" only work well for a small % of people who happen to mostly benefit from that one simple idea.
Others might need to tweak and think about and nerd out. Sad but if it's true, nothing we can do about it.
I mean, to be fair, if you switched out the dairy fat for ruminant adipose tissue, you'd be doing a keto version of the megafauna-hunting-diet. But you have special asks of a diet -- keto for sleep and weight loss both. In terms of raw macros, your diet is further from Yamnaya than it is from an archaeologically-correct megafauna-hunting-diet: you're missing the 200 daily grams of lactose.
Paleo as I experienced it in the 2000s2010s was fairly high-protein, low-carb. People were still much more afraid of (saturated) fat than now, and Protein Power had come out somewhat recently. This was when almost nobody had even heard of keto. And I probably couldn't do this diet w/o the dairy fat - I've tried substituting beef suet and I just can't stomach it. Tbh not even stomach, it just makes me gag.
Certainly most people who tried Paleo were hoping for weight loss, so that one's not a super crazy demand.
Fair enough on all counts. I've done a kind of paleo for a while but it was for health, not weight loss (it didn't help my health lol).
I'm not sure I could do it with just animal fat. There's probably the problem of the impoverished microbiome, as well as genetic changes. You could do ex150fecaltransplant and find out.
lol i don't believe in microbiome
Microbiome explains why the sets 'lactase non-persistent' and 'lactose intolerant' aren't just one set.
Sure. But if you only eat animal fat, your microbiome will adapt to that and you'll just have exactly the bacteria needed to digest animal fat. This whole idea of "eat X food to improve your microbiome" seems so dumb to me. Why would I train my microbiome to eat foods I don't want to eat? Just in case I land on a lonely island and don't want to adapt the first 2 weeks there?
Oh, no you can't just pick up the gut flora from the food itself. Otherwise there'd be no lactose-intolerant people anywhere, or people who can't seem to digest beef, etc. Beyond your genome that you probably 40% inherited from pastoralists, you also inherited gut flora passed down from mother to child down the long ages. Your own inability to digest big greasy gobs of straight raw suet isn't a genetic disability, it's that we've all lost many of our microscopic internal farm animals. With time-traveling microbe transplants you could probably digest with little difficult much of what your pre-Yamnaya ancestors did.
Oh, and gut microbiome is why ruminants are safe to eat -- we've kept their microbiomes in better shape than our own.
I also bought into the anti-dairy paleo argument and went several years without it. I'm functioning much better now that I get about 60% of my calories from milk/butter/cream.
Maps showing the frequency of hereditary hemochromatosis look quite similar to those showing the frequency of lactase persistence. I'm looking forward to when it's possible to upload my genome to a site and be presented with a personalised diet.
I think they might even mention that in the podcast, haha. Sounds familiar. I sure have high iron :)
I eat a lot of dairy and I think that I may be overdoing it. Could a problem stem from the vitamin A (that dairy could contain a lot of if you believe the low vitamin A crowd) content, calcium (wrt a calcium/magnesium balance) or salt that is added to cheese (see following paragraph)?
I'm interested in trying a low salt diet and I was currently wondering whether the paleo diet was including a recommandation about that? Were you eating a low salt diet during your paleo "experiment"?
Why a low salt diet (or maybe stated more correctly a low sodium/(potassium or other electrolytes) diet)? I believe it induces thirst and I want to drink as little water as I can (without it being stressful and I think lowered salt could make it far easier and less stressful). Why would I want to do that? Because it's possible that hyperosmolarity (but not when salt is increased) increases metabolism in case of lowered thyroid levels.
See figure 8 of this (freely available paper): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8495604_Vasopressin_and_oxytocin_release_and_the_thyroid_function
And this post of mine if you've interested in the thyroid axis: https://open.substack.com/pub/leadtheway/p/thyroid-and-water-homeostasis
I don't recall how much salt I was using during my Paleo days, but it wasn't zero. I think I upped my salt intake when I went keto, as many ketoers recommend that and I really got into steak and salting helped draw the moisture out. Until I went no-added-salt in 2022.
Skimmed your thyroid post, and most of it is over my head heh. I don't think I have thyroid issues, I've always run hot & my lab markers seem fine & my metabolic rate is fine. So I haven't read much about it.
What makes you think you're overdoing the dairy? In my experience, cheese & yogurt are way too delicious. So I have to stay away from them, at least ad-lib. Cream & butter are amazing for me. Could be that there's something similar going on for you?
I have looked into the vA aspect of cream a bit, cause it contains a boatload. Grant Genereux says it might be ok cause the fat binds the retinol. But he still advised me not to consume so much cream. Didn't follow that advice haha, wish me luck ;)
I do like not adding salt. I never missed it for a day, seared meat in butter tastes just the same without salt. Steak is just fine, too. And feels like I'm not retaining as much water, am not bloated as much from that. Also my cramps almost entirely went away even when working out now, and I have fewer headaches. Headaches when trying to go carnivore was what first caused me to cut out salt and I never went back.
Same thing for me, I upped my salt when I tried the keto diet, but it stayed when I started eating carbs again.
I think I eat too much yogurt/butter/cream too. Cheese not so much these days. For the reasons evoked, i.e. especially the high calcium content (I do not eat necessarily a high magnesium diet) and the potential vA overload. I'm afraid of auto-immune diseases and I believe vitamin A might be involved (when someone tends not to excrete or metabolize what he "over-consume" and this could be my case).
Going to try this low sodium things, hopping it will fix my issues 🤞 I think it's easy to get used to as you say but might be difficult when you eat out (if you want to be very strict about it which is not necessarily my case). This is encouraging it gave you some results (on water retention and headaches) :)
I'd go down slowly on the salt, maybe over 2 weeks. Drastic changes in salt seem to cause headaches for me.
Thanks for the advice!
Low fat AND high dairy is the bane of my diet. I need to go research and find a way to do low fat with dairy. At the end of most days my macros are 40-50% fat with 15-20% pro and 30-40% carb. Frustrating that low fat is so difficult.
Dry Curd Cottage Cheese, 0.9% fat content. 0% Skyr Yogurt. And Casein powder. Those are my go-to dairy staples.