Re: Kenyan diet has nothing to do with their running success

I am glad to see that all the symptoms that were ruining your life are gone. It is excellent that you are healed. That is first and foremost the point of this website from my understanding, and I appreciate that you bring your experiences and your views here. In my experience everyone has something to teach, and something to learn from every person.

That being said, just because eating a carbohydrate rich diet works for you, does not mean it works for everyone. The same with paleo, it does not work for everyone. This is a point I have been making in several of my posts, not to mention that other people have been pointing out the same thing as well. There is no one stop approach for every person on the planet when it comes to diet. Just because a vegan diet works for one person, does not mean it will work for everyone. That doesn't make the vegan diet good or bad, it just makes it an approach that a person can take towards using food for well being. It also doesn't make the practitioners you saw a bunch of "quacks", it just means that the diet didn't work for you. Chances are those same practitioners help many people on a daily basis. That is what I feel this website is about in many ways, trying out different protocols and seeing what works.

There are a hundred different people trying to define what the paleo diet is. The definition of the paleo diet is actually this.

"What people ate before recorded history 12000 - 250000 years ago."

This gets tricky in that not all people in all regions ate the same things. Nor did they eat diets that comprised of the same things all year long, many food items were seasonal. The people in the arctic did not eat the same diet as the nomads in asia, or the hunter gatherers in africa. The people in the arctic ate a diet comprising of pretty much 100% raw meat, and they ate it all raw because there is no firewood to cook it. This wasn't done out of a health protocol, it was done out of necessity. And when todays inuit switch to a western diet, they typically get sick. Trying to pigeon hole the paleo diet down to something specific doesn't work. Have 100 western people eating the diet of the inuit peoples and I am sure there will be very mixed results.

Its the same thing with grains, as you are well aware many people get sick from eating the wheat of today. But if you get those same people to eat wheat of an ancient variety they often have no reaction. Did you know that Tibetans historically ate a diet of which a huge part consisted of barley. They also did not eat much in the way of vegetables and fruit because it doesn't grow at high altitudes. When China invaded Tibet, they forced the Tibetans to grow wheat, and this in turn killed half of the people in Tibet. Changing the staple crop from barley to wheat killed half the population of Tibet. That is huge!

Because of this I believe that lumping all grains together and calling them bad is not a good idea. Mainly because many people have evolved and adapted over the centuries to be able to handle certain grains. Just as many people have evolved/adapted to handling dairy. Not all of the but a very large portion of humanity. But in todays world you don't always have a choice of knowing the source of your grain products, and so people decide to avoid them all together with a paleo diet and often get better. I also suspect that many of the Genetically-Modified-Organisms grains are causing a huge part of the reaction in people today, mainly because people have not evolved/adapted along side them.

That being said, today many people have all sorts of diseases of inflammation that did not exist in the numbers of today. Much of the leading edge Science is indicating that it is coming from diets high in simple carbohydrates, excessive omega 6 fatty acids, as well as other sources that hardly need to be mentioned. So if as it is suggested that 50% of people cannot easily digest/assimilate grains of today, and 85% of people do not digest/assimilate dairy well, it is no surprise that they do well on the paleo diet. Does that mean everyone will be sick from eating grains, dairy, and and large amounts of carbs... hardly. But if 50% of the population has not evolved/adapted to eating large amounts of modern dairy, carbs, and modern grains, it isn't surprising that they do well eating a paleo diet.

I often wonder about the future of fruits and vegetables. Will people get sick from genetically modified fruit and veggies in the future as well. I suspect this is a very likely possibility.

I do not know what your ancestry is, but I sure it is likely that somewhere along the line you descended from farmers who grew grains and who might have also not eaten large amounts of meat. There is a possibility that you digest/assimilate grains and other carbs well due to genetic factors. Who knows, your body might also have adapted well to a high carb vegetarian/vegan diet. The body is an amazing, and I hardly claim to understand fully. After all half the population of Tibet did survive after eating the wheat, bodies adapt and change.

What I am trying to get at is that a persons ancestry, not just recent but long term plays a role in their health. But not everyones ancestry is the same. When a person knows where they come from, they can make better educated decisions as to what kind of diet they should be eating for their well being. Ancestry is also not the only factor that plays into health. Everything is interdependent and interconnected. Looking for one thing to be a solution for everything doesn't work.

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