The following are some things I commonly hear from people who are not in the paleo community that I'm just downright sick of:
- Equating paleo with Atkins/low-carb or gluten-free.
There is a lot of overlap between low-carb, gluten-free, and paleo. A lot of paleo eaters are also low-carbers (although since I'm sure some of them are bringing on the pitchforks as I say that, you can eat paleo and not be low-carb as well). And paleo done right is inherently gluten-free.
The mistake people make is turning these two characteristics into the whole point of the diet. Paleo is about overall bodily optimization, not just weight loss, not just reduction of gastrointestinal symptoms. If I had to pick out one thing that characterized paleo for me it's not gluten-free or low-carb, but eating an abundance of healthy fats. And even that is not necessarily what paleo is for other people.
I personally hate being called "gluten-free" or "low-carb." Not because I'm necessarily not, but because these terms have a lot of baggage that don't characterize my lifestyle. Being called "gluten-free," for instance, gives people the undying urge to get me shit manufactured by Udi's. Speaking of which... - "Eating gluten-free is dangerous if you don't have celiac disease!"This one is part of why I started off with the odd comparisons above.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the absolute most fucking ridiculous things I've ever heard. The gist of this argument is that by not eating gluten we're shunning some unique number of nutrients found in wheat. This ignores a couple of things, though. First, most wheat today is either enriched or fortified. Fortifying means manufacturers have added more nutrients during processing to make it look healthier. In the case of enrichment, that means manufacturers are replacing nutrients they took out of it through processing. If wheat were really something that was "dangerous" for us to cut out, why do they need to fortify it?
I'm reminded actually of when I was still a vegan and people were constantly back-and-forthing over whether or not cow's milk is better for you than soymilk. Both vegans and non-vegans would make these absolutely fucking ridiculous comparisons... dairy advocates would compare unfortified soymilk to cow's milk with vitamin D added, soy advocates would whine that they compared unfortified to fortified but still managed to do the same damn thing. It was ridiculous. This is the same thing.
You do run into problems when people think that gluten is the singular health problem they need to worry about and respond by replacing their baked goods with rice- and potato-based substitutes that are also terrible for them (and also very expensive). But it's not getting rid of wheat that causes this problem, it's getting rid of it and then replacing it with nutritionally sparse calories.
Which is why paleo specifically as a gluten-free diet is even less relevant to this sort of scaremongering bullshit. Paleo eaters typically remove wheat (and all other grains) and then replace them with vegetables, fruits, and other whole foods. This is not dangerous and has a great number of health effects. - "Do you really think humanity hasn't evolved at all in the past 10,000 years?"
I get very sick of this one because my degree is in Anthropology and have a pretty strong background in how evolution works, so it's a little annoying to hear this sort of thing chanted as fact to me when their entire background is "learning how to argue against creationists."
This is one of those cases where people latch onto one commonly-touted reason to go paleo and then run with it as if it's a baseless assumption that makes up the entire bulk of paleo diet philosophy. If you spend any time within the paleo community, you'll certainly find people who willingly and unabashedly boil it all down to that. More likely, though, you'll find a lot of people who recognize that in some respects we've changed. This is where you get people who maintain that, for instance, people who are descended from ancestors who ate a lot of dairy are likely to handle dairy better.
Most of us will gladly maintain the very basics of this argument: Our bodies haven't evolved sufficiently to really, optimally handle modern foods. This really isn't that difficult a concept to grasp if you have a really good background in how evolution works. Grains and legumes have been instrumental foods for staving off starvation in a growing human population. The health effects of these foods don't typically kill people off before they're able to reproduce. Having health repercussions later in life is less likely to dramatically alter our evolutionary course. - "It's not the paleo diet that actually helps you, it's (accidental calorie restriction/cutting out processed foods/some other thing).""Oh, yeah, this lifestyle clearly works very well for a lot of people, but it's not the lifestyle, it's the things the lifestyle forces you to do." Seriously... what's the difference? If paleo incidentally leads to people cutting out processed foods or restriction of caloric intakes or some other thing that could be accomplished through another diet, isn't that still a good thing?
- "You're just going to gain the weight back as soon as you start eating normal again."This is probably the main reason so many paleo eaters (and vegans, and other people who change their eating habits long-term) really hate it when you call their eating habits a "diet." A "diet" is simply a way of eating, but people more often than not associate it with changing your eating habits short-term to lose some weight and then when that's accomplished going right back to eating the way you did before. If you do this, then no shit you are going to gain all the weight back (and all the health problems, and everything else).
If you want real long-term weight loss, real long-term improvements in cholesterol and high blood pressure and diabetes and so forth, you need to make permanent changes. This is not rocket science, and yet people still bring it up every time somebody brings up a diet they arbitrarily have decided they don't like. - "Paleo eaters eat more animals than other omnivores!"This is one of those things exclusive to animal rights discourse. Vegans have an extremely unfair fixation on paleo eaters because we're so unashamed about our meat-loving ways. I recall PETA for instance giving a paleo cookbook its award for worst cookbook one year. Their rationale is pretty much "They eat meat therefore they're bad."
The reason this is unfair is because a huge chunk of animal deaths caused by diet are actually due to corn, wheat, and soy production. In a typical omnivore's diet, the number of animals that met their deaths through that diet is significantly ramped up because of the corn, wheat, and soy eaten by the animals they are eating.
Paleo eaters culturally have a preference for grassfed, pastured meats. We don't all do it, but it's greatly recommended. A paleo eater who faithfully sticks to grassfed or pastured animals may even result in the deaths of fewer animals than a vegan, depending on what the vegan is eating. - "Paleo eaters are just annoying historical reenactors!"I love my historical reenactments (I'm a regular sight at primitive technology festivals and Rendezvous events, after all), and hey... maybe that did have something to do with my initial entrance into the paleo community.
As a whole, though, the paleo community tends to love its technology and modern comforts. There's lots of overlap between the paleo movement and the quantified self movement, for instance.
I think this is in a way exacerbated by the dipshit theoretical stories people tell in paleo books, giving fictional cavemen ridiculous names like "Ogg" and "Grok" and... well, maybe that's annoying to you. But it also doesn't say anything about the benefits or lack thereof of the actual diet.
