Showdown: Paleo vs LCHF; 3, 2, 1, fight!

There's a large amount of evangelism in the different dieting/lifestyle camps about which is better, and sometimes the arguments can get quite heated.

There's the strict paleo camp, normal paleo, primal, Atkins, Banting, ketogenic and LCHF camps, and there's even splinter groups within each of these, all with their proponents arguing that theirs is the one correct way.

The thing is, even though they all start at very different points, they end up at remarkably very close conclusions. Each of these “diets” are essentially, at heart, the same, there's only minor differences in what you can and can't eat. Yet those minor differences are the makings of almost holy wars.

When we talk about paleo and primals, they are based on the premise that we have been eating a certain type of food for 200,000 years before the advent of modern farming technologies and the human body is built to consume those particular foods. This directs us to “real foods” which our ancestors consumed, things like naturally reared meats, fish, and simple farmable vegetables, and away from mass farmed, mass produced items like wheat, sugar, legumes, gluten and in some cases dairy.

The LCHF style is based on the assumption that the human body runs best off fats and oils, in a mode known as ketosis and that when we eat excess carbohydrates our bodies shut ketosis down to convert to glycolysis. This allows us to eat things that are high in fats, such as meats, fish and full fat dairy (minus anything containing lactose), and encourages us to restrict our intakes of things that are overly high in carbohydrates, like wheat, sugar, and starches (including potato, corn etc).

There are also a few examples like Atkins, Banting, bulletproof and ketogenic too. However with all of these diets while their origins and reasoning are all varied and different, the final conclusions they come to all have a very high degree of overlap. If you're doing paleo or primal, you're basically doing LCHF. If you're doing LCHF, you're pretty much doing primal or paleo.

It's remarkable, that with so many different theories and origins, there were so many different people all working through the same problem and all coming so close to similar conclusions, don't you think?

If you want to sum up all the best parts of all the diets, and conclusions, what you end up with is:

Eat good naturally raised foods that we have been eating for many hundreds of thousands of years, keeping up high consumption of the fatty and oily foods, and keeping low or eliminating any foods that are artificially or mass produced and super high in carbohydrates.

Now if you take that conclusion, and compare it against any of the diets mentioned above, you'll see it makes a pretty tight fit with any of them.

So what were we all fighting about again?