Grains provide more nutrition than meat: debunking the carnivore and Paleo diets.

The Kevin Bass Show

In this episode, I ask the question: which diet would produce more nutrient deficiencies.

Using the nutrient calculator Chronometer, I am surprised to find that an all-whole wheat bagel diet actually produces fewer nutrient deficiencies than an all-ribeye diet.

If one was forced to choose between eating only wheat or meat, and one was aiming at the most nutritious diet, the answer is clearly to eat only wheat.

Even more surprisingly, a diet consisting of 43% calories from lentils, 43% from wheat, 9% from almonds and 5% from broccoli, carrots, and sardines produces an almost perfectly nutritious diet.

So why are Paleomyths about meat being more nutrient-rich than plants so widespread, despite the actual story being much more complicated (to say the least)?

My guess is that this is largely motivated by modernity anxiety. For all of human history, humans have idealized and romanticized simpler ways of life, as exemplified by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors all ate large quantities of meat. It follows that we should eat meat. We therefore look for sciency-sounding reasons for this belief. Folks like Chris Kresser, Robb Wolf, and Mark Sisson all provide these sciency-sounding reasons. Because this is what we already believed anyway, and we are just looking for reasons to believe it, instead of critically evaluating what these bloggers write, immediately we think “ahhh so that’s why!” We are already primed to believe, not to question. And so we believe. Or at least, once upon a time, I did.

The reality is that the role of plant foods in our ancestors’ diets is substantially more complicated than these writers let on. For instance, near-universal presence of wild grain/legume residues have been documented over the course of the Paleolithic, >100K years, i.e. ubiquitous presence of these foods during human evolutionary history.

Suffice to say, every scientific field is more complicated and richer in controversy than we think at first. Often, we first access a scientific field via a popular writer who tells a good story and appeals to pre-existing beliefs to sell that story. Yet no matter if they are a New York Times bestseller or a famous columnist or respected by large popular audiences on the Internet, we should always be skeptical of the new things we learn, especially if they resonate with and make sense of what we already believe. Unless we are aware of and have critically assessed the relevant body of scientific literature, there is no way whether we are being sold a good yarn or something with strong basis in scientific fact. Until we know better, we need to proceed through life with the assumption that most of what we know is simply a “best guess” based upon “something that we heard that sounded credible”. Because that’s all it really is. My journey through nutrition science, especially with respect to grains, carbohydrates, meat, etc., has taught me that over and over again.

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