The media has done a superb job of branding the paleo diet as a meat diet. Indeed, people seem to think that's all we eat. Many naysayers go there first, naming The China Study or maybe even some other idiot who skipped Day 1 of Stats class (when they teach the refrain, "correlation is not causation"). Or worse, they cite conventional wisdom as a legitimate source, "But all doctors say the same thing about meat."
Conventional wisdom holds little weight with me, but if that's what will convince some people (perhaps the ones who skipped stats AND history class), then let's roll with it. (History class, by the way, is where you learn that conventional wisdom is ALWAYS wrong.)
Perhaps the most universally accepted piece of conventional wisdom about health, told by our grandmothers and our cartoons and our doctors and our vegetarians alike, is "eat your vegetables." Well, I'm here today to demonstrate that the paleo diet is more vegetably than a vegetarian diet. Now please allow me to unravel your cognitive dissonance with copious amounts of what is known in academic circles as 'quantifiable proof'.
Following are 4 randomly selected vegetarian food pyramids from the interwebs that espouse vegetarian diets. To account for paleo bias, I chose three that were vegan.
Vegetarian Example 1: Vegetables come in at about 15-20% of total food volume. The biggest group? You guessed it! Grains.
Vegetarian Example 2: Vegetables come in at about 15% as well, being stamped out big time by grains that dominate almost 30% of the pyramid.
Vegetarian Example 3: Same story with vegetables again at 15%, being drowned out by Neolithic foods like grains, dairy, beans, even sweets.
Vegetarian Example 4: Vegetables come out of nowhere with 30-35%! Don't know why tomato is in the carb section, but I'll let that slide.
Vegetarians average (an inflated) 20% vegetable intake on the pyramid. Not too shabby.
Now, for some mind-blowing. Four Paleo Pyramids:
Paleo Example 1: Boom. Primal Blueprint puts vegetables in the base of the pyramid, I'd say that's about 20-25%.
Paleo Example 2: Some random loser posted this I bet. Veggies at 15%. (Outlier, obviously. But we'll count it.)
Paleo Example 3: CastleGrok's pyramid gets chosen at random and delivers vegetables at a whopping 25-30%.
But wait. Paleo Example 4 (perhaps closer to average than any other) delivers vegetables at about 30% yet again.
Paleo wins with about 25% vegetables in the diet. But I'm not satisfied.
I know for a fact that I eat almost twice the vegetable matter than my veggie-minded friends and especially more than my conventional-eating cronies. And I think that deserves some exploration.
First, let's look at the economic incentives. Vegetarians are likely to eat disproportionately more grains and legumes than the pyramid recommends because those things are cheap; Paleo dieters are likely to eat disproportionately less meat/fish because those things are expensive (we buy fresh, wild, grass-fed to boot).
Another confounding variable is population. Vegetarianism attracts people for two reasons: ethics and/or health. In particular, people sympathetic to animal rights and sold on disease prevention. These populations are not concerned with measuring proportions or optimizing athletic performance and are therefore more likely to stray from the 'optimal model' or pyramid, quite reasonably leading to indulgences, not to more vegetables.
The paleo population is also dominated by people concerned with ethics and/or health. In particular, environmental responsibility and athletic performance. Because they are motivated to excel athletically, they are likely to adhere to the optimal model, which limits fruit and nut intake, inevitably leading to even more vegetables than their vegetarian counterparts who stray.
Also worth noting is that vegetarianism in general contains more categories of food, commonly dairy, grains, legumes, sweets, fruit, etc. The more categories, the more each category becomes diluted. And you bet your ass that the vegetable category dwindles with all the others.
Now, excuse me while I go eat meat.
