How the Paleo Diet Works

and this is stuff you should know the podcast. Hm. Hey, congratulations to Jerry. Oh yeah, she's got married. Congratulations Jerry, way to go. She just gave a thumbs up. She has the right. Germain silent. Yeah, So congratulations to Jerry and Anna and uh sadly Jerry had to go to a different state to get married, but she did it, yes, because they have initiative. That's right, don't you, Jerry. Yeah. Some of the nice yeah congratulations chairs were very happy

for you guys. Um so happy in fact that we have a podcast. I just realized I said I'm very happy for you guys, and its sounded not at all happy for them. I'm very happy for you. I'm really happy for you guys. Yeah, but I think everybody bought that. You're happy for him. Everybody knows you, they know me. Well, Jerry bought it, and that's what counts. Jerry, did you buy it? Think interesting? I like your French chuck thanks to something I know how to say. Uh is it? No?

I mean I've got the bonjour down and Frosch fries, Frosch bread, France dressing, fross dressing. Uh. So you say all those things, French dressing, French bread, French fries, and I can tell you that none of them were around years ago. Nice segue, my friend. It wasn't. It was pretty clumsy. It felt clumsy, but thank you. Yeah. Are you talking about the Paleo diet? Yeah, which, by the way, short for Paleolithic diet. And um, this thing's been around

longer than I thought. The book was written by a guy named Dr Lauren Cordain, the creator of the Paleo Diet back in two thousand two, and um, Dr Cordain is no slouch. He is a celebrated PhD in Health and Health sciences UM, and he started looking at the massive chronic health problems that face Westerners and Americans in particular, I think we might be the most chronically unhealthy country

in the world. Um, as far as like beats, obesity, heart disease, all of these things go uh, and Dr Cordin is like, there's out to be a better way. And what he focused on was the idea that the Western diet is also a very modern diet, full full of processed foods, foods that are pre prepared, prepackaged, boxed. Even a lot of the pictures of the food are on the box laden with chemicals, vaive, stuff you're not gonna do at home, and um, stuff that tastes really good,

mainly because it's been designed to taste really good. Um. The problem is Dr Cordain believes this stuff is really bad for us because of those preservatives as chemicals, and a lot of the good stuff that was present in and at one point has been worked out removed. So his idea was, well, let's create a diet that's the opposite of modern, that's prehistoric even. And what he came up with was the paleo or Paleolithic diet. And the Paleolithic era um ended at about the advent of agriculture.

So the premise of the diet is like all of this stuff would be the same diet that a hunter gatherer would eat. Yeah, And the idea is, and this is there's a lot of controversy. Not everyone believes us any there's controversy with every diet, with every diet, But if you subscribe to this, the idea is that our

body chemistry and physiology has not changed. Like if you look at a if you think of it like a hundred yard football field, we went ninety nine yards as hunter gatherers, and then the last yard is since agriculture has come around, that's the longest yard. So are so our bodies have not changed genetically and they're the same

way they were back then. So to eat how they were back then and they did for thousands and thousands of years, makes more sense with that analogy with what happens when we succore a touchdown, like is at the end of vanity. I don't know, Um, but the dude you mentioned he wasn't the first. That was actually a guy in the seventies that wrote a book. Um Walter Voting wrote a self published book in seventy five called

The Stone Age Diet. Oh, I didn't know that based on in depth studies of human ecology and the diet of man. But like I said, it was self published and he didn't like it didn't blow up. It definitely took till the two thousands to gain traction. Has Cordaine like given this guy credit and he said, like he's based his ideas on this guy or what. I don't know, but I think he was the first guy to actually

coin that term. But um, yeah, these are people who subscribed to that notion that since we haven't changed physiologically and how we're supposed to eat, then we shouldn't be eating how we're eating, right, we should eat how we used to eat. I would suggest that that's not necessarily true. And part of the problem with saying things like that, or saying like, you know this is this is how paleolithic body human body um absorbed nutrients or these are

the nutrients that could absorbed. You're you're making a pretty broad and unsubstantiated claim in and of itself, like they did. Okay, Well, also, you don't have a paleolithic body to dissect to study. Um. All you have are modern bodies and assumptions about what

paleolithic diets were like. Now, I mean, there are still hunter gatherer tribes currently, but I haven't seen anybody say, well, we study these hunter gatherer tribes specifically for a very long time, and we've concluded that this paleo diet is is totally supported by this. It's basically people saying, no, this is what Paleolithic people would have eaten, so this is how how their body would have been. And when they make a step to that second sentence, you're you're

making a jump into an unsubstantiated claim. Just keep that in mind. That's all. And like you said, every every diet on earth is you're gonna find studies that say they're great and studies that say they're not so great. You're going to find people who say the food pyramid is what you should look at, and other people to say the food pyramids out of whack and we shouldn't be eating that many grains. Pyramid is out of whack. Yeah. But like you know, there is no definitive right or wrong.

I think because every time there's a study done, it seems like there's another study that can refute it. You just hit the nail on the head. There is no right or wrong because we don't understand our body, our bodies and our bodies metabolic processes enough to say this one's right and this one's wrong for everybody. Yeah, you know, there's no there's no baseline that's been established. We don't

know quite enough yet. And so the problem has been as we've set ourselves back decade after decade by basically picking a study whichever one got the media play and seemed the most sensible, and going with that, throwing lots of money and education, time and effort at bolstering that the findings of that study, even though it may or may not have been the case, rather than just saying, like, we're still figuring it out in the meantime, we think

maybe don't eat so much of this or whatever. Yeah, And I think that that's set us back quite a bit, which we'll talk about more later. Yeah. And I think just personally, like, if you're if you're doing it healthily, then find something that works for you. If that's Sugar Busters, great, if that's Atkins, or if that's Weight Watchers or Jenny

Craig or super Calorie Restriction or whatever. Not everything is gonna work for everyone, you know, or or paleo you know what are the other names, the warrior diet or the caveman diet. They're you know, they're fads, but that doesn't mean there can't be something to some of them for some people. Well, the other thing I think about diets that makes each one so controversial two is that they do end up ultimately being fats. But every single one of the diets aspires to be that one diet

that works for everybody. They all kind of claim that, and that's to sell books, you know, let's get real, But there are It's not like these things are are necessarily just totally made up out of the whole cloth. Like we'll talk about the paleo diet and and and the basis of it. Right. So the whole idea is is that, like I said, the modern diet has a lot of foods involved in it that are not good for you. And by cutting those things out, that's step one, Yeah,

basically eating cleaner. Right. But step two isn't just like, okay, so anything that you can find growing on a tree or you know that that has a face and you and you can eat it, um besides humans is healthy for you. Um, there's if you take it a little bit further, Uh, there's some things that you really shouldn't eat according to the Paleo diet. One of the things that it's centered around are foods that if you have to cook them to gain nutrients from them, Like beans

are a really good example. Uh, you can't eat them. You don't want them. In the case of the Paleo diet, the reason is they affect gut health supposedly, right, what else, welch, I mean, should we just go ahead and talk about what is on the good list and the bad list? Just so if you, I mean you've probably heard of

the diet before, especially lately, but generally very high in protein. Yeah, And a lot of people make the mistake of saying like, oh, it's just like eating huge steaks all the time, and and you know, pulling pulling women by their hair like it's like that. It's actually now they say proteins like fifteen or nineteen of the diet, right, whereas um protein for the average diet here in the West is about

so more protein. Um. And when we say protein, we mean poultry and pork and fish and eggs, and uh, you know, even red meat is on there of course. Uh, then lower carbohydrates, like a lower amount of carbohydrates and different kinds of carbohydrates. That's right, Um, The carbs you want are slow burning carbs. UM. And the idea behind this extends beyond just the paleo diet. There's a lot of diets, including Atkins, that believe in lowering carbs, and

they based it on But it's not no carbs. You do want some carbs because your body does need some energy. But you you do want some carbs, but you want carbs from things like an apple, or from celery or black olives, things that are slow burning carbs that will give you energy without raising your blood sugar. Something with them low on the glycemic index. Yeah, that's how it's scored. So something that has about fifty five or lower on

the glycemic index is considered low. And that's what you want as far as the carbohydrate is concerned, because it is going to give you energy without raising your blood sugar. When you raise your blood sugar, as I think we've talked about recently, UM, the insulin comes out to stabilize your blood sugar well, insulince and is a signal to your liver to start producing fat for storage and that's why you tend to gain weight when you eat carbohydrates,

because your blood sugar spikes and your insulin comes out. Yeah. And the difference, like, that's the difference between eating a sweet potato or a regular baked potato. Sweet potato, good, baked potato not so good. Yeah, And it's glycemic index both carbohydrates though, right. The problem is also is the glycemic index is extraordinarily unproven. Still it's a I don't know that it's a relatively new thing, but it's been

used much more frequently recently. But if you start really looking into the glycemic index, any uh reasonable source will say, like, here's the glycemic index. This is a pretty good understanding of it. But the difference between a tart apple in a very ripe sweet apple. You can't just say apples have a glycemic index of whatever, like one that's ripened more than another that's just the same exact apple from the same tree. You're going to have radically different glycemic induseries.

That's interesting. So I mean, like a solid point too, because it seems like there are too many definitive statements about diet when there shouldn't be. Absolutely the one that I think keeps coming up again and again. That's the most sensible is Well, we'll get too later, but it involves it's moderation basically. You know, paying attention to your food is very important, but but moderation, you know, like eating a bunch of Twinkies over the course of your lifetime,

it's not gonna kill you. But if you have to box of twinkies a day, like that's that's kill you. And that's a moderate moderate ration. Is is I think the key to health. I agree, man, And that's sort of the key to I think most things in life. Yeah, I mean it pops up everywhere like moderation. Our moderation is the spice of life. No, I don't think that's the phrase, but uh so. Fiber fiber is a big part of the paleo diet. Um fiber is super great

for your health. And people are getting too much fiber from um grains, or at least the thought is that you're getting too much fiber from your grains, whereas you should get it um and things like fruits maybe or whole grains instead of refined grains, non starchy vegetables. Uh yeah. And you if you're if you're counting carbs to um on like a low carb or no carb restricted diet

like say Atkins or something. You actually look at the total carbohydrates and then some act dietary fiber to come up with what's called net carbohydrates, and those are the ones that you actually count because apparently fiber is counted toward carbohydrates, which is why it shows up in things like non starchy vegetables and things like that. But um it doesn't raise your blood sugar, which is what we

come back to again and again and again. Okay, as far as weight loss is concerned, right, another part of the paleo diet is um fat intake, higher fat intake, but the what they call the right kinds of fats um oh make it three and o maga six fats mainly, so you want to get into that, Yeah, I think

it's time. So this is a well before we do, man, let's pull back from the precipice here and take a message breaks so quickly to recap things that you're gonna be eating on the paleo diet or lots of protein, lots of protein, um to vegetables, slow burning carbohydrates, fruits, nuts, things that you might have hunted and gathered, but not today.

Not beans, not legumes, not modern processed foods. Yeah, not salt and refined sugar is a really big no no. Yeah, and we got too fat and um, this is extremely controversial. I thought this super interesting. The well, the paleo diet, like pretty much any any typical diet these days, recommends that you really take it easy on the animal fats um. And the idea that the reason why pretty much everybody recommends you take it easy on animal fats saturated fats,

which are steeric acid, palmitic acid, and louric acid. Um. Those are the three biggest saturated fats found in animal fats. The idea that that everybody has for um steering clear of them is because they will give you heart disease, heart attacks, coronary disease. Yeah, if you eat too many saturated fats, you're gonna die of a heart attack exactly. This idea gave rise to a complete change in diet

among Americans and Westerners in general. The whole concept of a low fat diet, which your is everywhere you go to any store. It's like fat free, low fat, fat free, low fat. Everything is low fat now there's a version of its low fat came from an initial study from the fifties by a guy named Ansel Keys who carried out what's called the Six Countries study, and he basically was the first to link animal fat intake too heart disease. Yeah,

and it's uh, what do they call it? The diet heart hypothesis, And um, what stinks about that whole scene is that he sort of did the elementary school science fair project approach, which is he kind of ignored the data that didn't support what he wanted and cherry picked out the data that did and went with it. And somehow like even though there was like some opposition to it at the time, somehow it became the basis for how Americans were told to eat from now on, even

though it was flawed. Uh. I mean, for instance, one of the countries he studied was the United States. One of them was Japan. And he kind of said, hey, they have way more heart attacks in the US than in Japan. It's because he eat more fat. Yeah, they eat more animal fat and they have more heart attacks. Eats less animal fat and has fewer heart attacks. If so. Fact, though eating animal fat leads to heart attacks, and heart disease, right, not not considering the amount of sugar Americans aid, or

bread or nothing, lifestyle or anything. Yes, no, he didn't. Nothing else was controlled for. So that was part one. Part two is, like you said, he cherry picks six countries that supported his hypothesis. Uh. And at the time some other people pointed out, uh, countries. Yeah, we've got

a data for twenty two countries. And when you take all that data and do it a survey across the twenty two countries of a correlation between animal fat intake and heart disease, it goes away that correlation dissolves, not only dissolves, but like disproves it in some cases. Uh. The death rate from heart disease in Finland, for instance, was twenty four times that of Mexico, even though in Mexico the fat consumption rate was uh twice as much

as Finland. That's right. So that's complete opposite finding. So Keys does the six country study in the fifties, and then in nine he follows up with the seven country study. Uh. Well he this to this time he did Japan, Italy, the US, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, and the Netherlands. And he found the animal fat was a strong predictor of heart attacks over a five year period. Again, Um, they basically said, dude, what are you doing, Like you're you're not doing good

science here. And it's unclear, I should say, it's unclear whether keys misrepresented his data. Um, he published his findings like all that's fine. He wasn't like, I'm just not going to publish this. It was more like in his discussion at the end of the studies, they he was saying like, yeah, this kind of came up, but we're not paying attention to that. It doesn't matter, So he doesn't necessarily misrepresent the facts. He It seems like he was more a victim of the media saying, yes, there's

the answer. We've been wondering why Americans die more heart attacks. This guy just figured it out. It's animal fat and takes saturated fats, and it took off like a rocket from there. In the seventies. Well, it's sort of I mean, it makes sense to the ear. When you hear saturated fats, it sounds like, well, that's gotta clog your arteries and

give you a heart attack. Saturated well, you know it's saturated with the word saturated means that there's no double bonds of carbon in these atty change these fatty acid chains. So unsaturated means that there's at least one atom of carbon linked to another atom of carbon in the chain. In a saturated fat, there's hydrogen carbons linking all of the carbon atoms together. That's it. It's saturated with hydrogen carbon. It doesn't mean it saturates your arteries right and clogs

it up, which is what it sounds like exactly. And so Keys comes up with this, It takes off like a rocket. It becomes adopted officially by the federal government to encourage a low fat diet, and study after study after study just kind of follows and Keys footsteps. The thing is is if you really kind of look at these studies, especially ones that are just pointed to, is like these are definitive proof that the that that animal fat,

that saturated fat intake uh produces heart attacks. They kind of all fall apart, and you realize that for decades now, we've just been taken as gospel a first of all, an unproven correlation as causation, like completely unproven as far as like you know, unarguable evidence goes yeah, And there is definitely a dogma that's evolved around this that's been tough to crack. But a lot of scientists have been creating research and publishing research that says, look, man, we

don't understand fat like you think. It's not black and white and as simple as that, Like, for example, there's l d L fat and there's HDL fat, and people typically think that HDL is good fat. L d L is bad fat. Yes, right, So if you have and your body uses cholesterol to do things that produce hormones, especially sex hormones, so you need cholesterol, right, But it's the idea that you're that animal fats raise your l d L, which is the bad cholesterol. Uh, that that

gave them this bad rap. But even if you look at LDL cholesterol, not all the L cholesterol is the same. There's different things called subfractions, and depending on the subfraction, these start to correlate to heart disease finally, right, right, So some are small dns types of l d L and some are puffy and right exactly, and the pillowy

ones are fine. They seem to be totally fine. And what they found also is that the overall ratio of pillowy to dnse L d L is what finally you can get a good predictor of heart disease risk, not just L d L cholesterol, but the ratio. Like you can't even say, well, this guy's got a ton of small dense ld L particles in his bloodstream, so he's going to die of a heart attack. That's not necessarily

true because you haven't taken into account the fluffiness. And if you have more fluffiness then dense articles, then it's gonna even out. Yeah. Well, I like Ronald Krauss. He's a doctor out at UC Berkeley. He seems to kind of be hitting it on the head with at least how he's characterizing some of this stuff. Uh Like, one of his statements that struck me was he said it may these findings may simply suggest that unsaturated fats are are a healthier option, but not necessarily that saturated fats

are killing you. And that's just a very like reasonable thing to say to me. Yeah, he seemed like a very reasonable guy when he came in the other day. Well, in this article, and we should say this is the NBC um really exhaustive NBC news article called what if bad fat isn't so bad? It's really worth reading? Well, it is, and one of the lead how the article

leads in is super interesting. Um. They have found tribes in Africa, one called the mess ay Uh nomadic tribe in Kenya in Tanzania, and they basically live on a diet of fat, of of supplemented with blood from cattle, they heard, but they basically exist on red meat and whole milk. They're die it's like fat, and they're super lean and they're super healthy. And their cholesterol levels were some of the lowest they've ever measured in people. Right.

So people who responded to this these these findings said, well, obviously them as I have some sort of genetic predisposition to lower cholesterol. Somehow, there's something going on. No, because they studied a group of these these tribes, people who moved to the city and basically adopted a Western diet, and all of them just immediately there they went right

into the normal levels of risk for heart disease. UM. So it's clear that it's not just animal fats that are associated with heart disease, and they may not really be associated with heart disease at all, we're kind of in the stage now where science is undoing the damage while it still hasn't figured out the true answer. They just know that the that the the hot the the heart diet hypothesis has is not correct. There was more too.

Why did Congress in nineteen seventy seven say this is the way to go even though the American Medical Association said this is not necessarily true? Why did Why is the food pyramid endorsed? Does it have something to do with people lobbying for grains? Like? Who knows? Um? And

apparently it wasn't just nineteen seventy seven. They very recently also um the government endorsed and even lower saturated fat diet, like they dropped the percentage of calories daily from ten percent to seven percent, like this year or last year. And the big problem with this is that like it's not like, oh, all these people missed out on all that prime rib. They could have been eating the whole time, right,

That's not the problem with it. The problem is is like when we adapt, when we adapted adopted this low fat diet, fat gives taste to food, Yeah, delicious taste, it does. So when you remove fat, you you you're not gonna sell a product that's just fat free or even low fat unless you add more salt, unless you add more sugar. So if you look at the nutrition info on a low fat product, like yeah, there's lower fat, but buddy, you've got a lot more calories than you do.

And just the regular version of that side by side, which if you look at the medical records of every American, if you could from the sixties to today, you would find that while we reduced our intake of fat by a third, race of obesity multiplied by almost three times, and then eleven times where people have diabetes. Yeah, and I think it's a it's a truth that they found that people eat more of low fat foods because they

think they can. Yes, like, oh, it's just low fat mayo, So I'm gonna slather up both sides of my sandwich bread because it's low fat. And again this, well that's why, Like I'm not a paleo diet guy, but I think there's definitely something to eating cleaner. And you know, a doctor and a nutritionist that knows what they're doing, I'll tell you straight up, like don't eat things from a

box in your headed in the right direction. Yeah, it's true. Um, and anything that's kind of been taken from its natural state, even if it's like not in a box. Like for example, I did a brain stuff on what's the difference between whole milk and skim milk. Well, skim milk is really really, really messed around with milk, I processed, you could say, whereas whole milk you're like, oh, it's got a ton of fat, and I mean like that's cream mixed in there.

That's it's whole milk for a reason. It's not messed around with. I mean, yes, there's the whole thing with antibiotics, and you may be lactose and taller, But I'm just saying specifically from a nutritional point of view, if you have whole milk, you have whole milk. If you have skim milk, you have milk that's had the fat removed and replaced with some thing like high fruit toast, corn syrup or something like that, some powdered milk proteins. It's

it's messed around, it's it's processed. It's not the same thing. And the other problem with drinking anything but whole milk is that when you take the fat the milk fats out, which by the way, some uh margeric acid has been shown to actually lower your risk of heart disease. It actually increase your HDL good cholesterol. Um. When you take the milk fats out, you're also taking out the vitamin A and the vitamin D and those are fat soluble, which means that fat needs to be present for your

body to absorb them. Yeah, and you can make up for that in other areas, but you have to know to do that. It's like people who jump on and become like vegan or vegetarian, like you have to do your homework. If you want to do that, that's great, but you need to find a way to give your body the things that needs that maybe uh was in that milk or that red meat. Like with the paleo diet that they say stay away from dairy, which I disagree with. Yeah, this I found that some paleo will

drink dairy or ingested dairy. It's sort of a but it definitely isn't endorsed. But it's it's interesting that like we're the only animal that drinks milk into their life, like after after we're you know, weaned off of it. Yeah, I thought it's It's definitely an odd thing, and that's I think that's why the Paleo they say not to drink milk because Caveman didn't, you know, go around milk and cows no, And I mean we are rear to

drink milk. We remember in the Microbiome episode, we talked about how your your mother's like gut bacteria is transferred to you so that you can break down breast milk. So apparently the newest thing that I saw was that lactose intolerance comes from the fact that everybody can digest milk, but then only something like a third of humans keep maintain that ability to break down milk, and everybody else loses as they Yeah, it's interesting. I never really thought

about it before. But no one else but us drinks milk as adults. You know, even goats they don't drink milk. So um, Before we keep going, let's you want to do another message break Yeah. Okay, hey, Chuck, I don't know if you know this or not, but this episode has brought to you in part by squarespace. That's right, it's the all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. And we don't have to do that because we have

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use the promo code stuff. So Chuck, you said, I wanted to also say you said that, Um, you know some paleo people say, well, you can still eat butter or something like that, or drink milk if you go on the paleo website and read stuff from Cordaine. He is like, there's people out there who are like pay leo experts who say you can eat leg ooms or you can have a little bird something. He's like, they're wrong,

none of that right. Yeah, he's basically saying, like what I wrote is right, and like it's not an evolving concept that it's like you can't eat lagoons, you can't eat beans, like, it's not okay. There is something called the rule that he built into it, which I think was smart the time go paleo. Yes, you can have about three meals a week, um where that are non paleo and still get the benefits of the paleo diet according to the paleo diet. Hm, well it is that

they found. Do they have any like definitive research. There is no definitive research on any of these, right, like that the paleo will cause you to be healthier. Yeah, I mean no, here's the thing, Like, from this episode, I think the one thing everybody should walk away with besides an understanding of the basics of the paleo diet. So are you saying this is the takeaway? All right?

The takeaway is as follows, Chuck. If you see a study and uh, an article like, click on the link and read the abstract and see if the sample size is enough to convince you that it's a believable study. Yeah, we didn't even get into the four studies that a lot of the saturated fat argument is based on throughout the years. But there are four notable ones that are always pointed to, and every single one of them are flawed in some way. Yeah, I mean there's a there's

a problem with it. And and I say that also because, like even the article that we have on how stuff works sites a two thousand nine study published in Cardiovascular Diabetology, which is a journal, and it found that um, people with type two diabetes who followed the paleo diet for three months benefited more than those who followed a standard

recommended diet for diabetics. That sounds like a problematic study, Well it's it's but if you just read that sentence, and this is a very typical sentence for any media ar coal. You're like, oh, well, that proves that the paleo diet works. At least there's one study out there that proved that it works. But if you click the link and read the abstract, there were thirteen people in

the study, ten men and three women. They were they carried it out for two consecutive three month periods, and like, sure, okay, the findings proved that among these thirteen people, the paleo diet was better for people with type two diabetes than a diabetic diet. And but that can you extrapolate that? And the problem is is like even on our beloved How Stuff Works website, the way that the media is set up, it's like here, here's something that proves my point.

Here's something almost yeah, And it's just if you, if you, as a consumer or a thinking person, can just go a step further and just click that link. Like I almost guarantee you whatever study is being discussed the journalists is you know, link to it. Click the link and it'll take you to an abstract and you can read, you know yourself about this study and make your own decisions. Agreed. I think like that's my takeaway is to be your

own health advocate. Read read the labels of the things you're eating and putting into your body, do the research, read studies, and decide what works for you, uh and try it out. It's not like the end allbl you don't have to stick to it for life. No, And I mean I think most of the most of the diets that are around these days are for a prescribed

period of time, very difficult. There's like a boot camp like kind of version at the beginning, and then it becomes easier and easier and you reach like some sort of level of general maintenance. But I think from doing any diet like that for a couple of weeks even, one of the great things that you get from it is that you learn about your food, whether you want

to or not. Because just by preparing your own food, planning your own your meals every day, rather than just like going down to the cafeteria or going to like a fast food place and just buying something like, you're forced to get to know the food you're eating, Like you know how many carbs are in salary, you know like how much fat is in like this um this, you know, five ounce steak, Like you just know these things, and that in and of itself is something that makes

you better off just for having done it. Yeah. I think the ill health comes from from not planning and resorting to what's around you. Because what's around you and easy is usually not good for you. So you gotta put a little little effort into it. Um. I did find this, and I'm gonna I'm pooping it right off the bat. But US News and World Report did evaluated

and ranked thirty two diets from a panel of experts. UH. To be top righted, a diet had to be relatively easy to follow, nutritious, safe, and effective for weight loss and against diabetes and heart disease. So according to the experts, UH, these are the top ten diets. And by the way, the Paleo diet was thirty two out of thirty two. They had it dead last. The DASH diet is number one, UH. And we're not going to get into what all these are. You can look it up if you're interested, but the

DASH diet came in at one. The TLC diet is number two, and that is not the TLC network. It stands for something. The Mayo Clinic Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, and Weight Watchers all tied at number three, and then at number six something called the Flexitarian diet, which had never heard of. Also tied at six was Volume Metrics

number it does, uh. Number eight was Jenny Craig. Number nine was the Biggest Loser diet apparently they have their own diet, and number ten was the Ornish diet O R n I s h and uh man that it's a big industry. If you want to write diet books, try and get people going on good health, write diet books, start making like convenience food that falls within the diet. That that's some money. But uh so what's our advice, be your own health advocate, try to avoid package foods

and and uh put some time into it. That's right. How's that we should write a book? That's good stuff. If you want to know more about the Paleo diet, so you can um look them up online at Paleo diet dot com. Uh And yeah, just start looking around. If once you start poking into that kind of stuff like it, it's almost like a great entree into the world of like understanding your own nutrition. It's empowering. Yes, uh.

And if you want to learn more about the paleo diet, you can type those words into the search part house to work dot com. And since I said bad, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this defending Skinner. Hey, guess my name is and I don't know how to pronounce it's h A I k E. Any idea hike hike? H what h A I K? Hey? Maybe I'm gonna go with Hake. Hi. Guys, my name is Hake and I'm an Austrian UH psychology student. UM. I just wanted to defend poor B. F. Skinner in case no one

else did it yet. In the Anesia episode, you mentioned how Skinner's daughter should be honored because she was tortured in a box. Well, all Skinner ever put in the Skinner box where rats and pigeons. The thing he invented for his daughter was called the air crib. It is a crib that is higher than the average crib, so it's easier to stoop over. Uh. And in it there was a controlled climate for the infant. UH. Fresh clean air was coming in from the outside, and temperature as

well as humidity could be controlled. It sounds like a box. To me, it was just a device designed to make the baby's life more comfortable, in the parents life a little, uh, a little easier. Deborah Skinner is fine and untraumatized, and she herself says that people should stop talking rubbish about her dad and her So maybe I can help help her out with this email she owes you she does. Keep up the good work. Guys. Um, my boyfriend is also a fan. Oh so he is a is a

lady not necessarily, Oh yeah, that's true. Look at me. I'll find out I'm a caveman eating meat and nuts. That is very unlike me too. Good boyfriend's gotta be a girl, right. Oh and also, I wanted to point out an error I made and when I was talking about how I wanted to punch Jared with the toxic bread of subway. Oh yeah, you heard about it for that. Well, in my defense all the it turns out that it's

not true. But all that stuff came out after we recorded, like that was had just hit the news the day we recorded, and then all the other stuff saying no, this is one lady who had a bund to pick and she was wrong. That came out afterwards so, uh, Subway does not do that, and I still want to punch Jared. Okay, I hope Jared doesn't listen to this. I feel so bad if he came up with me one day he was like, Man, I really I'm a big fan. Video con hug him. Uh. I will look

forward to that. I'll get a video of that and post it. Uh if you want to get in touch with me and Chuck and point out how we were wrong or how we can better ourselves and that kind of thing. Oh and thank you. By the way, what did we end up on, Hike or Hake? I went with Hake. We'll go with Hack. Thanks hack Um. If you want to be like Hake and correct us, you can send us a tweet to s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff

you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and as always, you can join us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot com. M