Loren Cordain

So low carbohydrate diets are generally regarded as being anything under thirty percent of dietary energy coming from carbs, and that includes the paleo diet, which if you...

And again, there's lots of different, quote, "renditions of paleo," but the academic leader in this field in the past has been Loren Cordain, and he defined this as roughly about thirty percent of energy from protein and twenty percent of energy from fat-- I'm sorry, twenty percent of energy from carbs, thirty percent from protein, and the, what's left over is fifty percent from fat.

And Jeff and I had a meaningful conversation with Loren one day a few years ago, with Professor Cordain, I should say, and said, "So why the twenty percent is carbs?" He said, "Well, Steve, that's how much you need to have in carbs to feed your brain." And I said, "Well, you know, you can feed your brain with ketones." He said, "Yeah, but then you have to eat more fat, and nobody wants to eat more than fifty percent of their calories as fat.

That would be really dangerous." So what, what we're dealing with, I mean, he...

The latter was based on the assumption that significant carbohydrate consumption only started after we became neolithic farmers.

More recently, the diet gained popularity following the publication Loren Cordain's book, The Paleo Diet, which was published in 2002.

Its advocates say it helps with weight loss and is beneficial for general health.

It's become very popular online in the last decade as a method of weight loss.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, Loren Cordain was the guy.

He wrote a book called The Paleo Diet-

Mm

And he did so much research on his own that he has fixed his obesity, he's fixed his diabetes, and now he's helping other people do the same thing.

A third book is called The Paleo Diet by Cordain.

I love this book.

It was one of the very first books that woke me up and got me interested in this sort of thing.

the stuff I was reading at the time.

But yeah, I mean, I do know that Loren Cordain's paleo book-

Yeah

...

Modern industrial wheat is the problem, particularly here in America.

Now, even then, as Loren Cordain has so beautifully written about, wheat was a double-edged sword for mankind.

Yes, it fed us, but it came at a tremendous cost.

Human beings shrunk by a foot when agriculture started.