Thinking like a caveman, is it even possible? page 4

[Him]

You are not correlating that with cancer are you?

"One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/ma...anted=all&_r=0

[Paleobird]

You are not correlating that with cancer are you?

Given the vast medical literature showing that sugar feeds cancer cells and spurs them to divide and grow and cancer cells deprived of sugar fail to multiply and die off, yeah, I believe that the sugar content of my diet was a contributing factor (along with soy). Can I prove it, no. Will I ever go back to that way of eating again, hell no.

[Zach]

Didnt you get it pretty late in life? Not saying your diet had nothing to do with it but it seems like breast cancer is one of thise that could be caused by many different things. Did you use antiperspirant with aluminum in it? Didyou use lots of lotions and sunscreens and the like? Were you actually diabetic, how overweight? You said along with soy, seeing as Derp avoids soy like the devil it sounds like your diets werent all that similar.

Dont have to answer those questions.

[bloodorchid]

what my body wants and what i want is carbs. no matter what the form those carbs take, when i indulge and eat rice and potatoes and fruit as much as i want my pcos rears it's ugly head, uglily

what is your suggestion for me?

nothing?

[Urban Forager]

Is it possible to even think like our ancestors? And is trying to do so actually detrimental to our health and well being? Heres an example. Eating a paleo diet means restriction, something a paleo man would never have done. We (you) restrict certain food groups which are deemed unhealthy but were not actually around when paleo man lived. We restrict calories in the form of fasting because paleo man would have had times were food was unavailable. But paleo man would have never fasted, had food been available.

So paleo man never had to think of these foods to avoid and never had to restrict himself from something he wanted. Exact opposite actually, his very drive to live centered around finding any and all foods to eat.

These are good points and that may be why obesity is such a problem. IMO we are hard wired to want to eat things that taste good and to eat a lot. But paleo man didn't have foods that were bad for him available all the time. Generally speaking if something tasted good it was okay to eat. Think about what a person would have to go through to get honeycomb. There were external restrictions that limited food intake, paleo man probably didn't have to self impose restrictions.

The thing is we are now surrounded by foods that are bad for us and we've learned to think they taste good. But it has been my experience that if you aren't used to eating processed, manufactured foods they do not taste good. That's why it's so important to give kids real foods so they grow up prefering real foods. I have no problems passing up bagels, processed baked goods and fast food, I don't need to restrict myself because I don't like those foods. In fact I'm happy to fast if that's all that's available. So for me eating this way is not stressful I eat what I like and I don't like crap!

[Derpamix]

Given the vast medical literature showing that sugar feeds cancer cells and spurs them to divide and grow and cancer cells deprived of sugar fail to multiply and die off, yeah, I believe that the sugar content of my diet was a contributing factor (along with soy). Can I prove it, no. Will I ever go back to that way of eating again, hell no.

Otto Warburg clears this up. I've posted the link before. Neckhammer was kind enough to link some of his work for me as well in a previous thread.

I'm not going to be disrespectful and claim to know how or why you got cancer, and I'm truly sorry that it happened to you, but I'm going to have to disagree completely with your claim sugar causes and feeds cancer cells.

[Derpamix]

I don't think you have the nuances down. I think you (like me) enjoy diversity and are probably pretty happy to eat whatever, but get bored after awhile and naturally tend to a diverse diet, so you (unlike me) assume that that's the natural behavior of humans in general. I think it's the natural behavior of some humans. Humans like me. But I think there are other people, equally human, who follow completely different low-level drives.

The friend I mentioned above once explained his perception of the world to me this way, "Some things cause enjoyment. Most cause anti-enjoyment. (Him: his term) The misery of anti-enjoyment is 10 times worse than enjoyment can possibly be, so my actions are all based around avoiding anti-enjoyment." His body was either so different from mine, or he was so out of touch with it, that food cravings simply didn't enter into his behavior. Nor did health concerns. You could tell him he was 100% gluten intolerant and he'd still eat his mac-n-cheeze because that's a known low anti-enjoyment food. That world perception is so totally alien to me that I can't really imagine what he's talking about. For me the worst that usually happens is I try something, and it doesn't taste right, and I don't eat any more. That small unpleasantness is so minor that it doesn't stop me from trying foods, even many foods I have disliked in the past. I've experienced food poisoning from muscles left too long - seriously sick - and I still enjoy muscles. So I'm wired differently than my friend.

On a similar note I recently figured out that I have strong genes for tasting cyanoglucosides ... there is food that I find spit-it-out (though not never-try-it-again) awful, that others apparently perceive totally differently. It's weird.

Not really, I pretty much eat the same things all the time out of laziness and habit. However, knowing there are options out there for me is good enough to sate my appetite.

There are always exceptions to every rule as well.

[Paleobird]

Didnt you get it pretty late in life? Not saying your diet had nothing to do with it but it seems like breast cancer is one of thise that could be caused by many different things. Did you use antiperspirant with aluminum in it? Didyou use lots of lotions and sunscreens and the like? Were you actually diabetic, how overweight? You said along with soy, seeing as Derp avoids soy like the devil it sounds like your diets werent all that similar.

Dont have to answer those questions.

That's why I used the term "contributing factor". Soy is definitely another thing I view as a contributing factor.
I got it at age 45 which is prime time for breast cancer due to menopausal hormonal changes. I haven't used anti-perspirants since I was in my 20s, never use lotion or sunscreen, never was diabetic, and I didn't get overweight until after I got cancer. I gained weight over two and a half years of surgeries, chemo, reconstruction, reconstructing the reconstruction, etc. Not to mention the strain chemo puts on your thyroid and not being able to exercise. I have lost 65lbs since then and kept it off.

[Paleobird]

Otto Warburg clears this up. I've posted the link before. Neckhammer was kind enough to link some of his work for me as well in a previous thread.

I'm not going to be disrespectful and claim to know how or why you got cancer, and I'm truly sorry that it happened to you, but I'm going to have to disagree completely with your claim sugar causes and feeds cancer cells.

What Neckhammer linked showed that cancer does feed off of sugar not the opposite.

"In 1924, Warburg hypothesized that cancer, malignant growth, and tumor growth are caused by tumor cells mainly generating energy (as e.g. adenosine triphosphate / ATP) by nonoxidative breakdown of glucose (a process called glycolysis) and the subsequent recycling of the metabolite NADH back to its oxidized form, for reuse in the glycolytic cycle to complete the process (known as fermentation, or anaerobic respiration). This is in contrast to "healthy" cells, which mainly generate energy from oxidative breakdown of pyruvate. Pyruvate is an end product of glycolysis, and is oxidized within the mitochondria. Hence, and according to Warburg, cancer should be interpreted as a mitochondrial dysfunction.
"Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar." -- Dr. Otto H. Warburg in Lecture [10]"

Warburg got a Nobel Prize for this.

[zoebird]

I am not reenacting caveman times.

I have looked at the evidence regarding ancestral diets (which is broader than paleo) since 2000 or so, and most of it is interesting, modern science. None of this says that we need to "think" like our ancestors, but rather that if we eat in a way similar to our ancestors, and also do a ocuple of other things like they *might have* done (exercising by LHT for example), then we will be healthy.

Otherwise, I'm an entirely modern person, who eats a wide variety of foods (which on rare occasion includes wheat, and on less rare occasion includes rice, and on even less rare occasion includes sugar), who fits well into her environment, who is happy with her modern, city lifestyle, and so on and so forth.

The life of a caveman woman would be as strange and foreign to me as my life would be to her. No need for us to "try" to be like the other.