Are they good, bad, ugly?

Paleo, Keto, Atkins etc. what's the deal? my instinct is they're all scams but i ain't no expert

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Paleo is made up bullshit. Paleolithic people in most temperate and tropical regions ate like 60-70% plant foods. The only places where people ate huge amounts of meat all the time are like the arctic.

    Keto, I think, was a specific diet for like diabetes or some condition. Same with Atkins. Neither were intended for general use.

    Something like 90+% of people who try to lose weight dieting gain back all the weight within five years, and often gain more. Dieting is made up BS. Totally unscientific, unserious nonsense.

    • Marxist_Lentilism [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Of all the fad diets that exist, Paleo is one of the least harmful. A lot of it boils down to eating more vegetables and unprocessed food. Obviously the "we gotta eat like cavemen" aspect is pseudoscientific nonsense, but it could be a lot worse.

      Keto was originally used as a way to prevent epileptic episodes, and there's evidence that it's effective at this. There's also evidence that it's destructive to literally every single organ in your body and correlates to massively reduced life expectancy iirc

      • Owl [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The paleo is where some diet guru says "eat like a caveman, cut out all processed sugars and starches in favor of vegetables" and then someone with a typical Western diet consisting of nothing but meat and processed sugars hears it, skips over the word vegetables, and eats nothing but meat.

    • Dolores [love/loves]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      :sicko-yes: i've thought Paleo is stupid forever since i knew a weird bodybuilding household that did it. and these days its completely commercialized like motherfucking paleo bread made of flour-from-a-plant-we-arbitrarily-decided-is-OK. oh CAVEMEN had fucking nut farms they crushed up to make disgusting tortillas? DID THEY THOUGH? nuts & fruits totally haven't been selectively bred by humans in comparable ways to grains

      The only places where people ate huge amounts of meat all the time are like the arctic

      and they had to eat a bunch of nasty shit to make up for nutrient shortfalls. seeing a distinct lack of sea urchins and blubber on paleo plates :thonk:

    • ssjmarx [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Paleo is made up bullshit. Paleolithic people in most temperate and tropical regions ate like 60-70% plant foods. The only places where people ate huge amounts of meat all the time are like the arctic.

      The first time I heard about paleo, it was a guy on Stephen Colbert who emphasized that a big part of the diet was eating a lot of leafy greens and unprocessed fruit and veg. I think some wires got crossed somewhere and people started calling their wacky all raw meat diets "paleo" when that wasn't what that diet was supposed to be.