JP:

Welcome back!  I take it the "higher fat, less nuts and fruits" upgrade of functional paleo has worked for you...?

Diet and exercise is the first step in reclaiming our evolutionary heritage.  Humans are strong, capable predators, not depressed, angst-ridden, compliant herd animals.

JS

Patrick:

There are raw paleo eaters (and an entire forum dedicated to the topic), and "raw + meat and eggs" is a very healthy and nutritious diet.

Keep in mind that almost everyone feels great when they start raw, because they've eliminated so many frank toxins that paleo also eliminates: primarily grains and grain products (including "vegetable oil"), and all sorts of terrible junk food.  Raw also emphasizes the consumption of vegetables and fruits, with which paleo also agrees (though we usually moderate fruit consumption).

The trouble often comes after some months on the diet, when deficiencies start catching up with you.  The usual response is to restrict the diet even more to try and find the offending toxin...but nothing is going to fix a lack of B12, choline, K2, carnosine, saturated fat, cholesterol, etc.

Re: "eating domesticated animals doesn't seem very paleo", eating domesticated plants isn't paleo, either.  Wild cabbage was only domesticated and bred into its modern forms (kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower) a few thousand years ago, and what you see in a supermarket (or even your garden) has very little to do with what was eaten during the Paleolithic.  See my take on that issue in "What Is The Paleo Diet, Anyway?"

Re: meat frequency, it depends on the society you're talking about: modern foragers range from "every day, and it's basically 100% of calories" to "every few days on average".  All they have in common is that none are vegetarian, and all prize meat as the most desirable form of food even if they can't obtain it every day. 

That being said, if you feel best on a "gorge on meat every few days" schedule, then go for it!  It's easy to experiment, and it's not like you're committing to a year's prepaid membership in Club Paleo.

JS

Najam:

Grain-fed beef is still far better than eating the grains yourself.  Pasturing matters much more with pork and chicken, which seem to accumulate n-6 in their fat much more easily than ruminants do (cattle, sheep/lamb, goat, elk, bison).  The majority of meat in my freezer is, indeed, grass-fed — but when grain-fed rib primals go on sale for $5/pound, or I'm on the road, I don't worry much about eating them.

The only way to buy grass-fed beef at a reasonable price is to get a chest freezer and buy it by the side, directly from a local producer.  I hope to write an article about this process someday.

Uric acid is not a concern:

"Hyperuricemia results from the overproduction of urate (10%), from underexcretion of urate (90%), or often a combination of the two" (reference).  

"90% of UA filtered by the kidneys is reabsorbed, instead of being excreted. These facts suggest that evolution and physiology have not treated UA as a harmful waste product, but as something beneficial that has to be kept." (reference)

The primary factors that cause uric acid to be retained are alcohol and dietary fructose, with exercise also playing a role.  Therefore, one should cut alcohol and fructose if one is worried about gout.  

I know someone with lifelong gout issues who has not had one single attack since following the principles in this article, including basing their diet on fatty red meat.  The standard advice (cut alcohol and red meat) is only half right.

Brain and carbs:

Yes, our brain uses glucose as fuel…but it's perhaps 20% of our body's energy needs at rest, and those needs can be partially satisfied by ketones — which are continually being produced by the breakdown of fat for energy, even when one is not in ketosis.  This isn't a zero-carb diet, as I make clear in Step 1…and even if you decide to go zero-carb, the body can make glucose from protein so long as you're eating enough of it.

JS

David Siegel:

Oh, bosh.  If you can find me any controlled trials that show (for instance) unprocessed red meat is bad for you, I'm all ears.  To argue against 3.4 million years of archaeological evidence and basic biochemistry, you'll need more than bad epidemiology.

For instance: if the low-fat, low-meat, high-grain diet we've been told to eat for decades -- and have adopted -- is so healthy, why did obesity and diabetes skyrocket just after we began to adopt it -- and why is our functional lifespan decreasing?   Juggling self-reported associative data already proven to be bunk can't explain away the incontrovertible facts: we're fatter and sicker than ever.  

"If JS is so all-knowing, if he has indeed discovered the keys to a long healthy life, how does he deal with counter-examples? People like vegans who are robust and energetic into their 90s?"

My grandfather smoked two packs of cigarettes for over 50 years and lived well into his 80s, dying of a non-smoking-related illness.  That doesn't mean smoking is good for us!  

The science of longevity is reasonably well-established: “Among our centenarians we have no athletes, no vegetarians,” Barzilai said. Thirty percent of his subjects were overweight or obese in the 1950s, and close to 30% were smokers. “We have a woman who smoked two packs a day until the age of 91. She is now 105,” he said. “What I’m saying is that they didn’t do what we tell our patients to do.”

Instead, it turns out, these centenarians possess variants of one or of several genes that researchers believe protect the body against the harmful effects of aging. (Source.)

"If he is so good at sleuthing our original diet (meat most of the time with grains/starches to get through the lean times), where is the anthropology on that? How does he explain chimpanzees, our closest cousins, who do exactly the opposite?" 

I've covered the anthropology and archeology in detail.  There's plenty of archaeological evidence.  You may disagree with the consensus interpretation, but you may not imply that the evidence doesn't exist.  That's a specious argument. 

Besides, if we were still primarily frugivores, we'd still be limited to living in tropical forests with the rest of the chimps and bonobos, and we wouldn't need brains capable of making and using computers and the Internet.  Please apply some common sense to the problem.

"Ah, and what of protein? How much do we really need? Have you seen the randomized double blind studies on that? I don't think so."

Oh, bosh.  There is a raft of scientific evidence for optimal protein consumption, and it ranges from between 0.8 to 1.9 g/kg/day -- even more if you're low-carb.  Start reading here and here for all the citations you could want.

Note that this assumes complete protein with good bioavailability, such as eggs and meat.  Grain protein is both incomplete and less bioavailable, producing deficiency diseases like pellagra and kwashiorkor if not supplemented with meat or complementary plant protein.

"JS makes the same mistakes Taubes does – he proves others wrong using science and reason then advances his own theories using analogies, anecdotes, and diagrams."

Oh, bosh.  As I've already demonstrated, mainstream dietary advice is based almost entirely on bad epidemiology, not controlled trials -- and it has produced a fat, sick, diabetic America.  My work is based on biochemistry and evolutionary biology.

All that being said, you're absolutely free to eat what you want, do what you want, and believe what and whom you want.  You're even free to debate here in the comment section.  

However, you are not free to choose your own facts.  Obfuscatory rhetorical techniques that flout established science and misrepresent my work are not interesting, informative, or welcome.

Patrick:

Humans, being omnivorous, have become adapted to survive on a wide variety of diets, depending on their ecological niche.  It is definitely the case that eating real, whole, unprocessed foods, and avoiding Neolithic toxins like grains and grain oils, is more important than the proportions we eat them in.

I do my best to advocate what I think is optimal for most people...but I'm glad you've found a variation that works for you!

JS

Neil G:

1. A correctly functional metabolism can retrieve calories from storage as needed.  In fact, we have more energy available for maximal effort when we're not concurrently spending energy on digestion!

2. Everything gets stored and used (caveats below). The reason I recommend a relatively low carbohydrate intake (15-20% of calories, increasing with intense activity) is because excess carbohydrate — beyond our muscles' and liver's ability to store as glycogen — is indeed converted to fat, which often accumulates in the liver itself because that's where the conversion occurs.  This is why high-carb diets raise your triglycerides!  In contrast, fat can hang around in your bloodstream a lot longer without requiring conversion or storage…and if they get stored, fats are continually being cycled in and out of your fat cells anyway, so it's not as much of an issue.

The caveat is that amino acids (e.g. protein) have no storage pool and only last so long in your bloodstream…so if you're trying to maximize anabolism, you might consider grabbing a little bit of lean protein in between meals.  (I think even just isolated leucine does the trick.)  It doesn't take much…just enough for your body to not catabolize.

3. If you're trying to GAIN weight, by all means drink protein/fat shakes!  It's just a bad strategy to lose weight…and since most drinks you can buy are sugar bombs (soda, sports drinks, fruit juice and "smoothies", nonfat milk) it's a good rule of thumb to just eliminate liquid calories entirely.

4a. Bacon and pork – OK in moderation. Pork fat, especially industrial pork, is high in omega-6.

4b. I hate cottage cheese, so I'm the wrong person to ask.

4c. Greek yogurt is usually OK in moderation: it's a dense source of calories, but as long as you don't have problems with dairy, it's a delicious treat.  Note that a lot of junk gets passed off as "Greek" these days, as it's a hot item: if the unsweetened stuff is less than 75% calories from fat, I wouldn't buy it.

5. The basic "Eat Like A Predator" plan should get you down to a healthy weight.  You can optimize purely for fat loss by increasing protein intake, replacing as much of your fats as possible with MCTs (e.g. coconut oil), and decreasing total fat somewhat.

If you really want to get "ripped", you need to talk to the bodybuilders, fighters, and strength athletes, and you're going to need to do some unnatural things.  Jamie Lewis has you covered on that score (caution: lots of cussing and pictures of naked women, though damn funny IMO).

JS