The Paleo Diet for Athletes: A Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance
Loren Cordain, Ph.D., follows his success of The Paleo Diet with the first book ever to detail the exercise-enhancing effects of a diet similar to that of our Stone Age ancestors.
When The Paleo Diet was published, advocating a return to the diet of our ancestors (high protein, plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables), the book received brilliant reviews from the medical and nutritional communities. Jennie Brand-Miller, coauthor of the bestselling Glucose Revolution, called it “without a doubt the most nutritious diet on the planet.” Doctors Michael and Mary Dan Eades, authors of Protein Power, said, “We can’t recommend The Paleo Diet highly enough.”
Now Dr. Cordain joins with USA triathlon and cycling elite coach Joe Friel to adapt the Paleo Diet to the needs of athletes. The authors show:
o Why the typical athletic diet (top-heavy with grains, starches, and refined sugars) is detrimental to recovery, performance, and health
o How the glycemic load and acid-base bala… More >>
The Paleo Diet for Athletes: A Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance
Tagged with: Athletes • Athletic • Diet • Formula • nutritional • Paleo • Peak • Performance
If Paleo people were so fit and healthy why do authors of this book put so much empahsis on importance of sports drinks? How about soda bicarbonate to improve one’s performance, or caffeine? So where do we draw the line? Either promote NATURAL way of nourishing our bodies or lets have a list of supplements (as long as they are still legal) to give an athlete the edge. Too bad our ancestors did not have access to energy jels.
I didn’t think this book was an easy read. I think many other diet books flow better. I can’t imagine eating salmon for breakfast every day!
Nutritionist Loren Cordain created The Paleo Diet, and here teams with USA triathlon and cycling coach Joel Friel with The Paleo Diet For Athletes, a guide to using the premises of the Paleo Diet in the course of training. Runners, cyclists, swimmers and more can make easy changes using The Paleo Diet, which gives guidelines for what to eat before, during and after a workout or competition. Recipes included.
I’m not one to promote one diet over another, but by way of disclosure I am a vegan (which means I don’t consume any animal products) and a competive (though amateur) cyclist. I am also an anthropologist. My main problem with the Paleo Diet books is that they are based in part on flimsy ethnographic and physical anthropological data. Studies of the diets of contemporary foragers (who used to be called “hunters and gatherers”) are flawed in their methodologies and result in widely disparate data. They also do not take into consideration the history of most foragers as colonized subjects whose lifeways (including subsistence strategies) have been substantially altered by their domination by neighboring peoples or by the state-level societies in which they have lived for sometimes hundreds of years. In some cases carnivory may be a recent strategy as a result of resource scarcity, and not a time-honored practive dating to our hominid ancestors. We can’t assume much about early hominid diet from contemporary forager diets. Moreover, contemporary human populations have occupied specific ecological niches that are distinct from our paleolithic ancestors; no one would expect the Inuit, for example, to have developed a vegan diet since their environment would make that a huge challenge. Likewise, other populations in different environments will have developed distinct strategies for meeting basic nutritional needs. In addition, evidence of carnivory exists in the hominid record; but this does not tell us the degree to which it was important in the diet. Plant-based diets don’t leave a lot of physical traces (dentition patterns are one indication of diet). Meat eating may have been the result of scarcity and not preference; it may have aided population genetic fitness (via selection) but not overall health. So behind the “data” there are a lot of contradictions. How this in the end translates into increased athletic performance is another story. If you want to justify your diet on pseudo-science, fine. I would rather justify it on based on results. If this sort of diet (mislabelled “paleo”) works, great. If not, try something else. But don’t be fooled by the labels.
Two stars for the Paleo Diet but Zero stars for the “modifications.”
I was severely disappointed with this book. I hoped that an athlete would adopt the diet and adapt his training to the demands of the sound science that Dr. Cordain authored with his Paleo Diet. Instead, we have an athlete who has basically adapted the Paleo Diet to the high carbohydrate nonsense that permeates the “endurance world”, which leads to good results, but bad health. How many of our great athletes have to continue sacrificing their long-term health for short term goals?
Recovery is not a good enough reason to “adapt” and modify the diet. The goal of training is to race, not more training. I don’t think enough athletes understand that. There is a large section in this book about overtraining, but the authors “overcome” this seeming limitation ironically with the very thing that the Paleo Diet attempts to cure us from – - a misplaced reliance on excessive glucose which is responsible for the majority of the maladies that currently afflict us.
“Periodization” is also a problem. I’ll leave you this quote by Olympian Gordon Pirie which accurately details the issue:
“Another popular aspect of training which I think is very dangerous is that known as “periodization” – that is, breaking down the training year into various “phases”, each of which is divorced from the others. Thus, the beginning of the year may be devoted to a slow distance “build-up”, the second portion of the year devoted to hill training, a third part devoted to interval work and then speed training, and finally (though most of these runners never get this far) a racing season undertaken. The difficulty with training in this manner is that you go along quite well with one aspect of training (e.g. long distance running), and then suddenly, on a certain day, “Bang!”. You start hill-bounding, or speed-training, or something new, and the body simply is not ready for the change, and invariably, year in and year out, you are more often than not injured. The body should be trained in all aspects of running, all of the time. Only the emphasis should change as you progress through the year; no aspect of training should be entirely given up for any significant length of time. The balance between different types of training (distance running, intervals, hill running and speed training) should be adjusted as the year progresses” Pirie, “Running Fast and Injury Free”, Page 86.
This balance can be achieved with adequate rest. When an athlete gives up his dependance on sugar, he will find that he has much more strength and steady energy reserves. Sure, you don’t recover as quickly, but this is an indication that training is too hard, and one needs to adjust this training in order to successfully make it to the starting line. The science by Phinney and others clearly demonstrates that athletes, when given sufficient time to adapt to fat burning, were able to repeat their athletic performance. Frequency was a problem, but again, the goal of training is to race, not more training.
I’m disappointed that Dr. Cordain could not find an athlete willing to test his theories with sound and intelligent training, rather than the usual carb-load glucose-laden mess we’ve been stuck with. There are many low carb runners and cyclists out there who address the issues covered in this book far more intelligently and in a way that does not compromise their long term health as this approach potentially does.