Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. Today we’re going
to dip a toe into the battle royale that is vegan vs. paleo. I’ll start you off with
Gary Yourofsky’s answer to this heated debate and then close out with my own 2 cents. So
without further ado, let’s get ready to…well, talk I guess.
Gary: First of all, the Paleo diet is not a new diet. It's the standard diet. Paleo
is what you're doing, that's why it works. If I can tell you to do the exact same thing
that you're doing, you don't have to change anything, that's why people love it. Paleo,
Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Zone, Atkins... The only different diet on this planet, the
only unique diet, the only compassionate diet on this planet, the only healthy diet on this
planet, is a vegan diet. That's it. And study after study has proven this by the way. It's
not my opinion, it's not your opinion. There are dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens
of studies showing that vegans have the least amount of diseases on this planet. It's a
placebo effect. That's all Paleo is. You feel good often at first, in the end you've got
the same amount of heart disease, the same amount of cancers, the same amount of health
problems, and it ain't solving and curing anything. You can't solve diseases with meat.
You definitely can't do with dairy. I know Paleo, I think excludes dairy, so they might
have that part right. But you can't solve any health issues with animal protein. It's
toxic to the human body. You can't solve them with cholesterol, it's toxic to the body.
You can't solve with huge amounts of fat. You can't solve it with naturally occurring
trans fatty acids, that's not how you obtain health. Again, you might get lucky, but keep
in mind that not everyone that worked in an asbestos factory got mesothelioma. You could
get lucky, but lucky is not health.
Clearly the paleo vegan debate is quite a hot one and rather controversial. The thing
that I find personally interesting about this rivalry is the implicit belief that vegan
and paleo have to be mutually exclusive. There are people who eat vegan paleo. Paleo is all
about eating as our ancestors did and there is a large body of studies and research that
paints a surprisingly plant-based picture of our stereotypically meat-eating caveman
forefathers. In his article in Scientific American entitled, “Human ancestors were
nearly all vegetarians," Robb Dunn states that, “although “Paleolithic” diets
in diet books tend to be very meaty, reasonable minds disagree as to whether ancient, Paleolithic
diets actually were. Fortunately, new research suggests answers…to the question of what
our ancestors ate. The resolutions come, in part, from considering the question of our
diets in a broader evolutionary context. When we talk about “paleo” diets, we arbitrarily
tend to start with one set of ancestors, our most recent ones. But why do we choose these
particular ancestors as starting points? They do seem tough and admirable in a really strong
five o’ clock shadow sort of way. But if we want to return to the diet our guts and
bodies “evolved to deal with” (a concept that wrongly assumes our bodies are fine tuned
by engineers rather than cobbled together by natural selection), perhaps we should also
be looking at our earlier ancestors. If you want to return to your ancestral diet, the
one our ancestors ate when most of the features of our guts were evolving, you might reasonably
eat what our ancestors spent the most time eating during the largest periods of the evolution
of our guts, fruits, nuts, and vegetables—especially fungus-covered tropical leaves.” Now for
me personally, my main concern as a vegan is animal rights. I’m primarily an ethical
vegan, though I value all of the benefits of a vegan diet. Some people come to veganism
for health explicitly and I fully support that. I don’t care what gets you here, just
that you make it. And honestly, the health benefits of veganism often branch into deeper
convictions as people learn more about animal issues. But for me, even if my ancestors ate
nothing but meat and that was somehow the healthiest thing for me to eat, I would still
choose veganism. Fortunately, as it is, I get to eat in a way that doesn’t involve
the blood and suffering of other being and is healthy and ancestrally sound, or as much
as you can be in this day in age. But if you want to eat paleo vegan or junk food vegan
or any other variation of vegan, I say, go for it. Do what works for you, as long as
it’s not encroaching on the rights and lives of others. I’ve included some reference
links and resources about this topic in the blogpost for this video that's linked here
and in the video description. Now that you’ve heard Gary’s take on paleo and my quick
two cents, I’d love to hear what you think. Let me know in the comments. Give the video
a thumbs up if you liked it and please share it around. Stay tuned to the Bite Size Vegan
channel for more installations of my interview with Gary and you’re new, be sure to click
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see you soon