Recently, U.S. News & World Report ranked the top 20 of the diets currently circulating in the public consciousness, "with input from a panel of health experts." All of these diets are superior to the typical western diet, but they put the Paleo Diet down in the basement, at #20. I thought this odd, when I read of it (and so did the author of The Paleo Diet, Dr. Loren Cordain... you can read his response to the diet ranking here), so I hopped over to the U.S. News website and took a look, and found this blurb next to the Paleo Diet on their list:
Experts took issue with the Paleo diet on every measure. Regardless of what a dieter's goal is—weight loss, heart health, or finding a diet that's easy to follow—most experts concluded he or she is better off looking elsewhere.
Really, U.S. News? Really?
The weight loss (or, if we look at it from a more positive, accurate, health-oriented, and social-stigma-free perspective, body-composition change) of any diet is, for most people, dependent upon being coupled with an adequate level of physical activity. If you're intensely physically challenged by your vocation or everyday life, that's fine, but for most of us this need translates to our fitness program. Accepting this requirement, Paleo Diet success is plastered far and wide across the internet, and often ends with the most dramatic increase in fitness. Besides our Rhonda at QuantumFit, I'm not going to bother with links. Just Google "paleo diet success stories."
We all know that fat causes heart disease, right? Oh, wait... if you've been paying attention to anything I've written, linked to, or talked about for the past year, you know the science about this is not as sound as we've been led to believe. There are good fats and bad fats, and it comes as a total lack of surprise to me that those which have evidence to support their goodness are abundant in foods associated with the Paleo Diet (stearic acid, DHA, and EPA to name a few), and that fats known for their badness are limited or, in the case of the very bad trans-fat, absent entirely. Other than a higher intake of fats relative to low-fat diets, I'm not sure where the concern about heart health comes from here... no one I know of interprets the Paleo Diet as "eating buckets of lard."
Easy to follow? OK... I'll give them this one, from one perspective; changing habits is hard. If you've not been eating paleo, or close to it, if you love your Coke or Pepsi, this will be a real challenge. However, it's also one you need to take up (or some similar diet) because the crap you are eating is killing you. And, no one said you have to dive in all at once. Some people (like myself) do better with diving in, committing 100% to a dietary change. Others may do better adopting Paleo in stages... first lose the soda, then lose pre-processed foods, then start cutting back the grains... it's do-able.
From the perspective of what the diet requires, what constitutes it, I would argue it's the easiest to follow on their list. Diet #1, the DASH diet, lists two different sources to explain the premise of the diet in the "how does it work" section, and opens with the phrase "first, decide how much you want to read." By contrast, the Paleo Diet in this section neatly outlines the entire dietary model in one sentence, and opens with "Paleo diets are based on a simple premise." Could you read more about it? Sure... I read bucketsful of info on the Paleo Diet regularly. It all depends on how specific you want to get. However, the basic diet is a simple philosophy, and the beauty of it is, despite efforts to the contrary, it's hard to posit a valid argument that it's unhealthy. We may find, someday, that it's not actually optimal... but eating lean meats, veggies, nuts and seeds, avoiding processed foods? I've read rants about the dangers of the Paleo Diet which make it sound like we're suggesting people eat Snickers bars and drink gin all day. What is so dangerous about eating lean meat and veggies?
In fact, the U.S. News "Are There Health Risks" section on the Paleo Diet cautions that by shunning grains and dairy, we could be missing out on a lot of nutrients. As I've said before, there are no nutrients in grains and dairy which you cannot get in abundance in foods which are on the Paleo Diet. Technically, yes... if you cut all the non-Paleo foods from your diet and don't replace them with the quantity and variety of veggies, nuts, and fruits that you should be eating, you could end up malnutritioned. But, that's true of any diet.
I'm not qualified to say that the Paleo Diet is unequivocally, objectively the best diet for optimal human health. I advocate it because it is structurally simple, proven effective, and manifestly poses no inherent health dangers if you're following it properly. However, reading the U.S. News diet rankings, I think that the issues brought up in their review don't hold up well... sometimes in the light of statements made in other sections of their own article.
Most telling however is that the Paleo Diet has, in response to the question "Did this diet work for you?" which is posted below the blurb for each diet on the list, the most "Yes" votes and least "No" votes. Overwhelmingly.
