Our modern information age is at once awesome and terrible:
Awesome: Science and academia are no longer just for Ivory Tower elites. Anyone, just about anywhere, can read, interpret, and provide constructive criticism of research, nearly as it is being published.
Terrible: The human tendency to form tribes and to attack anything that is not part of their tribes’ doctrine is put on steroids in the largely anonymous online world. New ideas are seldom analyzed for mechanistic merit. They are looked at through the lens of “consensus” which often seems to be a kind of Orwellian NewSpeak amounting to: Industry influence and Academic Inertia that cock-blocks curiosity and common sense.
The online world is an interesting balancing act of Citizen Scientists doing N=1 self experimentation (which ideally then drives review paper, pilot studies and Randomized Controlled Trials, RCT’s) juxtaposed with folks who make absolutely outrageous claims that defy the Laws of Nature.
There is absolutely a need for vetting, but curiosity has been replaced by a smug attitude generally wrapped in august trappings called “skepticism.”
In the past 20 years of suggesting that the Ancestral Health model might have much to offer, it’s been interesting to observe the nearly religious fervor on the parts of both supporters and detractors of various ideas.
Science does inch along and the video below looks at a paper recently published on the Autoimmune Paleo protocol.
It is NOT the end, it’s the barest of beginnings, but it is quite promising.
In addition to unpacking that research I do my best to place it in the proper context of where the AIP approach is with regards to scientific investigation. I use the Mediterranean Diet as an example of how this process occurs and make a bit of an interesting discovery along the way. I also recently interviewed the study authors and you can check out that podcast here.
tl;dr? (or in this case didn’t watch? Here are some juicy take-aways:
1-This pilot study looked at people with active (medically documented) gastrointestinal disease with and AVERAGE of 20 years.
2-The 6 week pilot study saw all participants not only finish the trial, but they also experienced complete remission in disease symptoms.
3-The misapplication of the Mediterranean Diet concept may be at least partially implicated in the increase in non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
from The Paleo Diet http://ift.tt/2k6TfMR
