What’s Happening: Question Everything

This week, the news is all about questioning our own (and everyone else’s) opinions. One of the huge strengths of the Paleo world is the willingness to look just as skeptically at our own arguments as we do at conventional wisdom. There is no incontrovertible truth; there are no infallible experts; there is no indisputable research. Whether it’s taking on mainstream nutritional mistakes or looking critically at our own positions, the debate is never closed – and that’s a good thing.

Questioning the Mainstream

• Last week’s study on salt revived sodium as a bone of contention within the diet world. Some mainstream scientists are reconsidering their positions; others are still insisting that salt is dangerous. In a hilarious two-part series (part 1 and part 2), Adele at Eathropology takes on the utter lack of evidence connecting salt to obesity, high blood pressure, or anything else other than making your broccoli tastier.

• Getting rid of officially sanctioned salt-phobia would be a big step forward for all of our health (if only because it would free up time and energy for more important causes), but an even bigger benefit would be a re-evaluation of knee-jerk statin prescriptions. In case you needed another reason to think twice about going on statin drugs, a new study showed that the harshest statins may also raise a patient’s risk of diabetes. They might be life-saving for certain groups of people, but they definitely aren’t harmless prophylactics for everyone who’s ever looked sideways at a stick of butter!

• The struggle between the conventional establishment and the rest of us also got political this week with the trial of Vernon Hershberger, an Amish farmer in Wisconsin who is facing jail time for the crime of selling raw (unpasteurized) milk. Whatever your thoughts may be on the nutritional benefits or relative safety of pasteurization, at least we can all agree that prosecuting a family farmer for providing people with real food should be the least of the government’s priorities right now.

Questioning Ourselves

• It’s important to question the mainstream, but it’s even more important for the alternative health movement to question itself, and the starch debate is one of the best examples of that. The earliest versions of Paleo were strictly low-carb, based on the premise that human beings naturally evolved to survive on a ketogenic diet. But that particular story about evolution isn’t universally accepted. This week, a lengthy post from Melissa McEwen at Hunt Gather Love questions the “carnivore ape narrative,” the idea that a low-carb diet is the only evolutionarily natural way for human beings to live.

• Another self-critique this week came from Chris Kresser, whose latest podcast covers recent research into Vitamin D that might suggest new recommendations for supplementation and sun exposure. Nothing is definitive yet, but it’s a topic to keep an eye on.

Have you ever had to take a second look at something you thought was true? What did you learn from it? Let us know on Facebook or Google+.