This year the paleo diet ranked #35--dead last. Diets that this list inexplicably thinks are better than paleo include the raw food diet and the macrobiotic diet. Wait... paleo is worse than the raw food diet? I might have snorted when I read that. Anyway, because anybody who actually takes even half a second to look at what a paleo eater actually eats--perhaps without putting the label "paleo" on it--will recognize that it's a diet rich in whole, real foods... I couldn't fathom why paleo was somehow beaten out by the raw food diet of all things. So I decided to look at the standards they're using for ranking these diets as well as what they specifically say about paleo.
And unshockingly, this is a pretty goddamn useless list.
Weight Loss, Short Term and Long Term
I should reiterate that for many people paleo is not a weight loss diet. In my own case, although I want to lose weight, I'm largely satisfied if I even so much as eliminate the symptoms of my wheat allergy and odd reactions to brown rice. Still, weight loss is a huge factor in why people diet, so it's important to look at. They gave paleo a score of 2.1 for short-term weight loss and 1.7 for long-term weight loss. With such specific figures you know they must have a reason, right?
Looking at the dedicated page for the paleo diet on the site, though, you learn that research on both short- and long-term weight loss among paleo dieters is practically non-existent. This is extremely disconcerting, because until you look at the data and specifically click on these diets it's pretty much marketed as a definitive list of good vs. bad diets. To quote the website's "Will You Lose Weight" header:
No way to tell. Paleo diets haven’t yet drawn the attention of many researchers. One tiny study that looked at weight loss found that 14 participants lost an average of about 5 pounds after three weeks on a Paleo regimen. (But even the researchers called their study “underpowered.”) Still, if you build a “calorie deficit” into your Paleo plan – eating fewer calories than your daily recommended max, or burning off extra by exercising – you should shed some pounds. How quickly and whether you keep them off is up to you.I think it's perfectly reasonable to state that the paleo diet doesn't have enough empirical data supporting whether or not it's really a good weight-loss diet. The problem is that not knowing if a diet is effective isn't the same as the diet being documentedly ineffective. So basically, two of the criteria they use are already useless.
My favorite part is their "no shit Sherlock" statement that a calorie deficit will help you lose weight.
Nutrition
They give paleo a score of 2.0. For some context, they give the vegan diet--a diet that if unsupplemented is life-threatening--a 2.8. Looking again at the specific page for the paleo diet, it's easy to see why they gave it such a low score, which is that they are using USDA guidelines as their only standard. This is actually a flaw in the entire idea of being able to rank diets on a simple scale and not just with the people who created the list. They needed a simple way of gauging whether or not the diets are nutritionally adequate and used the RDA guidelines because, well, it seems pretty obvious... without mentioning even once on their whole page that practically every major paleo advocate has issues with these guidelines.
Their issues with paleo are the same ones you'll see trotted out by anybody else who hasn't really looked into the subject. "There's too much fat!" "There's too much protein!" "Carbs! You need more caaaarbs!" I think it would be reasonable for a site like this to mention that paleo does not meet these guidelines, but it's disingenuous to do that without also explaining that we have arguments for why this is.
Some nutrients they mention as possibly being lacking include calcium and vitamin D. I've found that calcium in the paleo diet is a highly variable thing, especially considering how many of us consume dairy products. The problem is that calcium is only one of the minerals responsible for bone health, and it's greatly overemphasized. Paleo in some respects does better due to these other minerals. And vitamin D is something hard to get on most diets.
They also make a big deal about giving up grains. This is in the same vein of thought as those articles making a fuss about how giving up gluten is "dangerous" if you don't have celiac disease... look at the lack of some token nutrients found in wheat products--usually in fortified or enriched forms, not whole forms--and then ignore the other sources of those nutrients.
Cardiovascular Health
They give a 2.0 for heart health, because of the fat levels. This is the second lowest score after the Dukan diet, even though they mention there are studies showing improved cardiovascular markers like blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. They don't mention any studies that show lowered cardiovascular health, they are basing the score entirely on fat.
Diabetes
The page says that we don't know whether or not paleo is good for diabetes, yet they still gave it a score of 2.1. Based on what?
Ease of Use
They gave paleo a score of 1.7 for ease... and then entirely contradicted that on the page. This score is based entirely on the fact that paleo cuts out some food groups, but they acknowledged that it has a high satiety level and that there is a really high support level through cookbooks and Internet communities.
I actually take some issue with this category, though, because so much of "ease of use" has to do with lack of proper accommodation. Eating well should be easy, but food corporations and people you associate with can make it difficult with false advertising, stubbornness, addition of weird-ass filler foods, and so forth. The word "paleo" can now be found emblazoned on stuff with soy, sugar, and other non-paleo ingredients. A lot of the difficulty is due to this.
A big chunk of the rest of the difficulty has to do with things like addiction, habit, and ubiquity. In cases like mine, it's legitimately difficult to avoid wheat--despite a confirmed allergy and a lot of horrible side effects--because eating a little sends me into an addicted haze where I eat every cookie in a five mile radius.
Paleo eaters a lot of times croon about how easy paleo is. I disagree. I also disagree that it has to be easy to be worthwhile.
Safety
How nice of them, they added a whole category just to tell us if our diets are dangerous. Paleo got a 2.3. Veganism--which again I must mention has a life-threatening vitamin deficit if unsupplemented, something paleo does not have--got a 3.0.
We were beat out by... raw foodism?!
Raw foodism beat out paleo, largely because on a raw food diet you are heavily likely to get too few calories.
I've been picking on their vegan page a bit, but there's a reason for that: I'm an ex-vegan and have a pretty good idea of what veganism entails. You know what's really interesting is what doesn't show up on the vegan page.
It doesn't mention that you have to supplement B-12. It says you can rely on fortified foods. This isn't true and that's like the first thing any vegan learns.
It says that you might need to supplement vitamin D if you don't get enough sun, because vitamin D is found mostly in animal foods. But didn't it say on the paleo page that paleo eaters will get little to none? Even though most of us eat fatty fish. Hmmm.
Their remarks that veganism is satiety-inducing, but being hungry all-the-fucking-time is a pretty well-known problem among vegans (when I was a vegan I felt hungry even when I was packed full of food).
It also says it should be easy for vegans to stay under 2300 milligrams of sodium, which is a serious fucking joke. Whoever wrote that has probably never been vegan, or if so is some sort of vegan superhero.
Conclusion
People diet for a lot of reasons and as far as I'm concerned if you want to try any of these that's entirely up to you. That doesn't change the fact that this list is extremely shady, assigns numeric values contrary to what evidence we have or more likely in the absence of evidence, and oversimplifies human nutrition.
