Stuff You Should Know - How the Paleo Diet Works

Episode Date: May 15, 2014

You may have heard of the Paleo Diet, also known as the Caveman Diet, but do you know the science it's based on? And did you know that the saturated fat it and other diets avoid may be healthier than you were taught in school? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, k-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is

risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase, go to squarespace.com slash stuff and use the offer code stuff. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry,

and this is Stuff You Should Know. The podcast. Hey, congratulations to Jerry. Oh, yeah. She's got married. Congratulations, Jerry. Way to go. She just gave a thumbs up. Yeah. She has the right to remain silent. I'm married. Yeah. So congratulations to Jerry and Anna, and sadly, Jerry had to go to a different state to get married. Yeah. But she did it. Yes, because they have initiative. That's right. Don't you, Jerry? Yeah, thumbs up again. Nice. Yeah, congratulations, Jerry. Yeah, we're very happy for you guys. So happy, in fact, that we have a podcast. I just realized I said I'm very happy for you guys and it sounded not at all happy for them. Yeah, I'm very happy for you. I'm really

happy for you guys. Yeah. But I think everybody bought that you're happy for them. Everybody knows you. They know me. Well, Jerry bought it and that's what counts. Jerry, did you buy it? Interesting. I like your French, Chuck. Thanks. That's the only thing I know how to say. Is it? No, I mean, I've got the bonjour down and French fries, French bread, France dressing, France dressing. So you say all those things, French dressing, French bread, French fries. And I can tell you that none of them were around 20,000 years ago. Nice segue, my friend. It wasn't. Oh, it was pretty clumsy. I liked it. It felt clumsy, but thank you. Yeah. Are you talking about the Paleo diet? Yeah, which by the way is short for Paleolithic

diet. And 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 2002. And Dr. Cordain is no slouch. He is a celebrated PhD in health and health sciences. 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 as far as like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, all of these things go. And Dr. Cordain was like, there's got to be a better way. And what he focused on was the idea that the Western diet is also a very modern diet, full of processed foods, foods that are pre-prepared, pre-packaged, boxed even. A lot of my pictures of the food are on the box.

Layed in with chemicals and preservatives? Stuff you're not going to do at home. And stuff that tastes really good, mainly because it's been designed to taste really good. The problem is, as Dr. Cordain believes, this stuff's really bad for us because of those preservatives, those chemicals. And a lot of the good stuff that was present in it 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 ended at about the advent of agriculture. So the premise of the diet is like all the 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 this. And 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 think of it like a 100-yard football field, we went 99 yards as hunter-gatherers. And then the last yard is since agriculture has come around. That's the longest yard. 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. I'm concerned with that analogy with what happens when we score a touchdown. Like is that the end of humanity? I don't know. But the dude you mentioned, he wasn't the first, there was actually a guy in the 70s that wrote a book. Walter Voten wrote a self-published book in 75 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 it didn't blow up. It definitely took till the 2000s to gain traction. Has Cordain given this guy credit? I don't know.

And he said he 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. I got you. But yeah, these are people who subscribe 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. 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 how a Paleolithic body, human body, absorb nutrients. Right. These are the nutrients that could absorb. You're making a pretty broad and

unsubstantiated claim in and of itself. They did okay. Well, also, you don't have the Paleolithic body to dissect, to study. 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 totally supported by this. It's basically people saying, you know, this is what Paleolithic people would have eaten. So this is how their body would have been. And when they make a step to that second sentence, you're making a jump into an unsubstantiated claim. Just keep that in mind.

That's all. And like you said, every diet on earth is you're going to 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 that say the food pyramid's out of whack and we shouldn't be eating that many grains. Oh yeah, the food 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 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 baseline that's been established. We don't know quite enough yet. And so the problem has been, as we've said ourselves back decade after decade, by basically picking a study which everyone got the most 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, oh, 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, but we'll talk about more later. Yeah, and I think just personally, like, if you're doing it healthily, then find something

that works for you. If that's sugarbusters, great. If that's Atkins or if that's weight watchers or Jenny Craig or super calorie restriction or whatever, not everything is going to work for everyone. Right. Yeah. Or Paleo. What are the other names? The warrior diet or the caveman diet? Yeah. 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 too is that they do end up ultimately being fads, but every single one of the diets aspires to be that one diet that works for everybody. Right. They all kind of claim that and that's to sell books, you know, just get real. But there are, it's not like these

things are necessarily just totally made up out of whole cloth. Like, no, we'll talk about the Paleo diet and the basis of it. Right. So the whole idea 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 has a face and you can eat it. Yeah. Besides humans is healthy for you. Yeah. There's, if you take it a little bit further, 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. Right. You can't eat them. Right. You don't want them. In the case of the Paleo diet, the reason is, is they affect gut health supposedly. Right. What else? Well, I mean, should we just go ahead and talk about what is on the good list and the bad list? Yeah. 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, no, they say proteins like 15 or 19 to 35% of the diet. Right. Whereas protein for the average diet here in the West is about 15%. Right. So more

protein. And when we say protein, we mean poultry and pork and fish and eggs. And, you know, even red meat is on there, of course. Right. Then lower carbohydrates, like a lower amount of carbohydrates and different kinds of carbohydrates. That's right. The carbs you want are slow burning carbs. Yeah. And the idea behind this extends beyond just the Paleo diet. There's a lot of diets, including Atkins that believe in lowering carbs. Yeah. And they base it on, but it's not no carbs. You do want some carbs because your body does need some energy. Right. 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. Yeah. Something with low on the glycemic index. Yeah. That's how it's scored. So something that has about a 55 or lower on the glycemic index is considered low. Yeah. And that's what you want as far as a 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 talked about recently, the insulin comes out to stabilize your blood sugar while insulin sends a signal to your liver to start producing fat for storage. Right. 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. But if you start really looking in the glycemic index, any 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 and a very ripe sweet apple. Right. You can't just say apples have a glycemic index of whatever. Right. Like one that's ripen more than another. Right. That's just the same exact apple from the same tree are going to have

radically different glycemic indices. Yeah. That's interesting. So I mean, that's 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, we'll get to later, but it involves, it's moderation basically. Yeah. You know, paying attention to your food is very important. Yeah. But moderation, you know, like eating a bunch of Twinkies over the course of your lifetime is not going to kill you. Right. But if you'd a box of Twinkies a day, that will kill you. And that's a moderate. Right. Moderation 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. All right. Moderation is the spice of life. No, I don't think that's the phrase. So fiber, fiber is a big part of the paleo diet. Fiber is super great for your health. And people are getting too much fiber from grains, or at least the thought is that you're getting too much fiber from your grains, whereas you should get it in things like fruits, maybe, or whole grains instead of refined grains. Non-starchy vegetables. Yeah. Yeah. If you're counting carbs, too, on like a low carb or no carb restricted diet, like say, Atkins or something, you actually look at the total carbohydrates and then subtract

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 it doesn't raise your blood sugar, which is what we come back to again and again and again, as far as weight loss is concerned. Another part of the paleo diet is higher fat intake, but what they call the right kinds of fats, Omega 3 and Omega 6 fats, mainly. Right. 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 break. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival

the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're gonna get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses,

Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So quickly to recap, things that you're going to be eating on the Paleo diet are lots of protein, lots of protein, lots of vegetables, slow-burning carbohydrates, fruits, nuts, things that you might have hunted and gathered back in the day. 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 this is extremely controversial. I thought this was super interesting. Well, the Paleo diet, pretty much any typical diet these days, recommends that you really take it easy on the animal fats. And the idea that the reason why pretty much everybody recommends you take it easy on animal fats, saturated fats, which are stearic acid, palmitic acid, and loric acid. Those are the three biggest saturated fats found in animal fats. The idea that everybody has for 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 going to 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 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 it. It's low-fat. It came from an initial study from the 50s 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 to heart disease. Yeah. And what did they call it? The Diet Heart Hypothesis. And 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. Yeah. Even though it was flawed. 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 U.S. than in Japan. And it's because they eat more fat. Yeah. They eat more animal fat and they have more heart attacks. Case closed. He eats less animal fat and has fewer heart attacks. It's so facto. Yeah.

Eating animal fat leads to heart attacks and heart disease. Right? Not considering the amount of sugar Americans ate or bread or lifestyle or anything. Yes. Nothing else was controlled for. So that was part one. Part two is like you said, he cherry picked six countries that supported his hypothesis. And at the time, some other people pointed out. There's a lot of other countries. Yeah. We've got data for 22 countries. Yeah. And when you take all that data and do a survey across the 22 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. Yeah. The death rate from heart disease in Finland, for instance, was 24 times that of

Mexico. Yeah. Even though in Mexico, the fat consumption rate was twice as much as Finland. That's right. So that's complete opposite finding. So Keyes does the six-country study in the 50s. And then in 1970, he follows up with the seven-country study. Who did he add? Well, this time he did Japan, Italy, the U.S., Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, and the Netherlands. Okay. And he found that animal fat was a strong predictor of heart attacks over a five-year period. Again, they basically said, dude, what are you doing? Like, you're not doing good science here. And it's unclear, I should say. It's unclear whether Keyes misrepresented his data. He published his findings, like all his findings. 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. 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. 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 intake, saturated fats. And it took off like a rocket from there in the 70s. Well, it sort of, I mean, it makes sense to the ear when you hear saturated fats. It sounds like, well, that's got to clog your arteries and give you heart attacks. Saturated. Well, you know what it's saturated with. The word saturated means that there's no double

bonds of carbon in these fatty chains, 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 the carbon atoms together. That's it. It's saturated with hydrogen carbon. It doesn't mean it saturates your arteries 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 in keys footsteps. The thing is, is if you really kind of look at these studies, especially ones that are just pointed to as like, these are definitive proof

that the animal fat, that saturated fat intake produces heart attacks, they kind of all fall apart. And you realize that for decades now, we've just been taken as gospel, first of all, an unproven correlation as causation. Like completely unproven. Yeah. 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 LDL fat, and there's HDL fat. And people typically think that HDL is good fat. LDL is bad fat. Cholesterol. Yes. Yeah. Right. So if you have, and your body uses

cholesterol to do things like produce hormones, especially sex hormones. So you need cholesterol. Right. But it's the idea that your, that animal fats raise your LDL, which is the bag cholesterol. Right. That gave them this bad rap. But even if you look at LDL cholesterol, not all LDL cholesterol is the same. Right. 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 dense types of LDL. Yeah. And some are puffy and pillowy. 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 dense LDL is what finally you can get a good predictor of heart disease risk.

Not just LDL cholesterol, but the ratio. Like you can't even say, oh, this guy's got a ton of small dense LDL 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 than dense particles, then it's going to 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. Like one of his statements that struck me was he said it may, these findings may simply suggest that unsaturated fats are a healthier option, but not necessarily that saturated fats are killing you. Yes. And that's just a very like reasonable thing

to say to me. Yeah. Well, he seemed like a very reasonable guy. You know, when he came in the other day, right? He's a nice dude. Well, in this article, I wish to say that this is an NBC, 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. They have found tribes in Africa, one called the Masay nomadic tribe in Kenya in Tanzania. And they basically live on a diet of fat, of supplemented with blood from cattle they heard, but they basically exist on red meat and whole milk. That's like 60% fat. Yes. 60% 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 findings said, well, obviously the Masay have some sort of genetic predisposition to lower cholesterol. Somehow there's something going on. No, because they studied a group of these tribes people who moved to the city and basically adopted a Western diet and all of them just immediately, they went right into the normal levels of risk for heart disease. 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. Right. While it still hasn't figured out the true answer, they just know that the heart diet hypothesis is not correct. There's more to it.

Why did Congress in 1977 say this is the way to go even though the American Medical Association said this is not necessarily true? Why is the food pyramid endorsed? Does it have something to do with people lobbying for grains? Like who knows? And apparently it wasn't just 1977. They very recently also the government endorsed an even lower saturated fat diet. They dropped the percentage of calories daily from 10% to 7%. 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. That's not the problem with it. The problem is, is like when we adopted this low fat diet, that gives taste to food. Yeah. Delicious. Delicious taste. It does. Yeah.

So when you remove fat, you're not going to sell a product that's just fat free or even low fat unless you add more salt or unless you add more sugar. So if you look at the nutrition info on a low fat product, yeah, like, yeah, there's lower fat, but buddy, you got a lot more calories than you do in 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 11 times more people have diabetes. Yeah. And I think 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 going to slather up both sides of my sandwich bread. Yeah. 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 in a nutritionist that knows what they're doing. I'll tell you straight up, like, don't eat things from a box and you're headed in the right direction. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. 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. Yeah. Well, skim milk is really, really, really messed around with milk. Yeah. Processed, you could say. Whereas whole milk, you're like, oh, well, it's got a ton

of fat in it. I mean, like that's cream mixed in there. That's, it's whole milk for a reason. It's not messed around with. Yeah. I mean, yes, there's the whole thing with antibiotics and you may be lactose intolerant, but I'm just saying specifically from a nutritional point of view. Yeah. 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 something like high fructose corn syrup or something like that. Some powdered milk proteins, it's messed around. 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 margaric acid has been shown to actually lower your risk of heart disease. It actually

increase your HDL, good cholesterol. Right. When you take the milk fats out, you're also taking out the vitamin A and the vitamin D. Yeah. 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 it needs that maybe was in that milk or that red meat. Right. Like with the paleo diet that they say, stay away from dairy. Right. Of which I disagree with. Yeah. I found that some paleo will drink dairy or ingest dairy. It's sort of a,

but it definitely is an endorsed, but it's interesting that we're the only animal that drinks milk into their life, like after we're weaned off of it. Yeah. I thought it's definitely an odd thing. And I think that's why the paleo, they say not to drink milk because cavemen didn't go around milking cows. No. And I mean, we are reared 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 maintaining that ability to break down milk and everybody else

loses as they age. It's because we're supposed to. 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. Hey, Chuck, I don't know if you know this or not, but this episode is 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 our own website. But if I was a single guy, I would sign up for Squarespace. Okay. Do you have intuition? Uh, you do. Yeah, you do. And since you have it, you could use Squarespace. It's like drag and drop. There's no

need to learn how to use code. And if you find yourself in a pickle, they've got 24 seven customer support, email support, live chat. They're there all the time for you. Yeah. And it's super design focus is going to look amazing. And, uh, you know, it's not too expensive either. No, it isn't too expensive. Costs are as low as $8 a month and includes a free domain name. If you sign up for a year and get this, everybody, we have a special offer for you. You can go to www.squarespace.com slash stuff and sign up for a free 14 day trial with no credit card necessary. And if you use the offer code stuff, STU FF, you can get 10% off of your first purchase. Well, that sounds like a good deal. My friend, it does. So everybody go to squarespace.com slash stuff and 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. Uh, if you go on the paleo website and read stuff from cordane, he is like, there's people out there who are like paleo experts who say you can eat legumes or you can have a little bar or something. He's like, they're wrong. He's saying none of that. Right. Yeah. He's basically saying like what I wrote is right. Right. And like it's not an evolving concept that it's like you can't eat legumes. You can't eat beans. Like it's not okay. There is something called the 85 15 rule that he built into it, which I think was smart. What's that? Like 85% of the time go paleo? Yes. So 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. Well, as they found, do they have any like definitive research? There is no definitive research on any of these, right? Like the paleo will cause you to be healthier. Yeah. I mean, no, I, 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? Yes. All right. The takeaway is as follows, Chuck. If you see a study in, uh, an article, like click on the link and read the abstract. Right. 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 I say that also because like even the article that we have on how stuff works sites, a 2009 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 just sounds like a problematic study. Well, it's, it's, but if you just read that sentence and right, this is a very typical sentence for any media article. Yeah.

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 13 people in the study, 10 men and three women. They were, they carried it out for two consecutive three month periods. Wow. And like, sure. Okay. The findings proved that among these 13 people, the paleo diet was better for people with type two diabetes than a diabetic diet. And but then can you extrapolate that? And the problem is, is like even on our beloved house stuff works website, the way that the media is set up, it's like, here, here's something that proves my point. Yeah. Here's like a trap 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 journalist is, is not, you know, link to it, right? 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 be your own health advocate. Read, read the labels of the things you're eating and putting into your body. Yeah. Do the research, read studies and decide what works for you and try it out. It's not like the end. I'll be all, 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. Yeah. 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. Right. 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. Yeah. Like you know how many carbs are in celery. Right. You know like how much fat is in like this, this, you know, five ounce steak. Right. 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 not planning and resorting to what's around you because what's around you and easy is usually not good for you. Right. So you got to put a little effort into it. Yeah. I did find this and I'm going to, I'm pooping it right off the bat. But US News and World Report did evaluate it and ranked 32 diets from a panel of experts. To be top rated, 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, these are the top 10 diets. And by the way, the paleo diet was 32 out of 32. Wow. They had it dead last. Wow. The dash

diet is number one. 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 out 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 you've never heard of. Also tied at six was volume metrics. Number eight. That sounds science. It does. Number eight was Ginny Craig. Number nine was the biggest loser diet, apparently to have their own diet. That's not surprising. And number 10 was the Ornish diet, O-R-N-I-S-H. And man, 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 convenience food that falls within the diet. That's some money. But so what's our advice? Be your own health advocate. Try to avoid packaged foods and 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 too, you can look them up online at paleo diet.com. And yeah, just start looking around. Once you start poking into that kind of stuff, it's almost like a great entree into the world of understanding your own nutrition. It's empowering. Yes. And if you want to learn more about the Paleo diet, you can type those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this Defending Skinner. I don't know how to pronounce it. H-A-I-K-E. Any idea? Haike? Haike? H-A-I-K-E. Is this for Haike? Haike? Maybe. I'm going to go with Haike. Hi, guys. My name is Haike. And I'm an Austrian psychology student. I just wanted to defend poor BF Skinner in case no one else did it yet. In the Amnesia 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 were 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. And in it, there was a controlled climate for the infant. Fresh, clean air was coming in from the

outside, and temperature as well as humidity could be controlled. Oh. Sounds like a box to me. It was just a device designed to make the baby's life more comfortable in the parent's life a little easier. Debra 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 her out with this email. She owes you. She does. I keep up the good work, guys. My boyfriend is also a fan. Oh, so he is a lady. Not necessarily. Oh, yeah. That's true. Look at me. I find out. I'm a caveman. Eating meat and nuts. That is very unlike me, too. Hey, you got a boyfriend. You got to be a girl. Right? Oh, and also, I wanted to point out an error I made 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, it turns out that it's not true, but all that stuff came out after we recorded. Like, that had just hit the news the day we recorded, and then all the other stuff saying, no, it's just one lady who had a bone to pick, and she was wrong. That came out afterwards. So Subway does not do that, and I still want to punch Jared. Okay. I hope Jared doesn't listen to this. I'd feel so bad if he came up with three more days like me. I really am a big fan. Yeah. A videocon. Oh, I'd hug him. Yeah. I will look forward to that. I will get a video of that and post it. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck and point out how we

were wrong or how we can better ourselves or 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 Hake. Thanks, Hake. If you want to be like Hake and correct us, you can send us a tweet to syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at discovery.com. And as always, you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the

iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.