While the anecdote is interesting, cancer patients are perhaps not the best sample group for extrapolating to the healthy.
Many of the other extreme elimination diets I tried showed obvious signs of micronutrient deficiency. For example, I tried bread and water, lean meat and water, etc. It's easy to recognize signs of deficiency - fatigue, cravings, etc.
But I wouldn't say scallops have everything. I did lose weight. I think you'd have to add in some fish to get a complete diet. Not so much for vitamins or minerals, but for something related to satiety and macronutrient composition. It could be insufficient fats/oils, or maybe you can't get enough protein because it triggers satiety too fast due to impending overdose of some micronutrient. Or maybe it's just the taste.
I've been going for many months on a diet of solely rice, fish, scallops, rice and shrimp. Since I'm still healthy and productive, there can't be any short or medium-term deficiency there.
In general, however, a meat-only elimination diet works. See the Stefansson trial, and his study from living with Eskimos. Meat with sufficient fat on it is all that is needed to sustain human life, and it can even come from a single animal, as long as that animal isn't being grain fed from mineral depleted soil.
Thus it's not so much surprising that rice, water, and any X meat is sufficient for health. Rather, the extreme positive biological reaction to micronutrient overload from high scallops intake is what's surprising.
Paleo is a big tent with many suboptimal stalls.
Plant nutrition is more difficult to optimize than animal sources. Plants are not strictly necessary, and become completely optional once comfortable starch intake is achieved.
Yes, paleo is great. No, it is not a fad, although it contains various fads.
Fad: "a temporary fashion, notion, manner of conduct, etc., especially one followed enthusiastically by a group."
Paleo is no more a fad than are herbal remedies. Neither are temporary phenomena.
Sometimes it's better to ask than to assume someone has already exhausted his case.
http://eatingoffthefoodgrid.blogspot.com/2009/10/pleistocene-diet.html http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes.html
Yes, you're right, I was wrong about that
Yep, should work
I scored 1560 / 34 on SAT / ACT and 99th percentile on GMAT as well, if I recall correctly. I've never taken an IQ test. I was born in 1984, so by the time I took them the SAT's were less g-loaded.
I would say average, peak and trough performance all greatly improved, but I can't quantify it. I felt like a genius, relative to where I had been, and much quicker mentally.
I have no way of returning to my previous diet right now, so I can't rigorously test this.
In theory, any shellfish should do it. Shrimp don't have this property. Shrimp are scavengers, whereas shellfish filter water. The latter activity is what creates the high mineral content.
Yes, although hunger decreased dramatically, so I didn't eat nearly as much scallops as you would think. Scallops have a major impact on food satiety and cravings, I've found. I suspect we tend to overconsume food to compensate for low density of key micronutrients.
My long term stable diet is 1. scallops daily, one package; 2. unlimited white rice; 3. lean fish - cod, perch or pollock; 4. shrimp for flavor/texture.
Diluting the scallop content brings down cost. The enhancement effect isn't quite as extreme, but it's still very good.
This diet has almost no fat or any other difficult to digest substances due to my intraheptic cholestasis. If you are digestively normal, you could fill out the rest of the diet with any paleo ingredients, as long as you eat scallops daily.
I believe this delivers superior performance to the typical paleo grass-fed organ meat route, but I cannot personally test this due to my limitations. I think humans are well adapted to a shoreline diet due to bottleneck event(s) caused by some natural catastrophe that rendered extinct those humans without access to shorelines. If you've watched Survivor, you know that any bipedal idiot can gather shellfish on the beach. Ancient shellfish middens indicate that they were a major food source.
Longevity is not the only factor of interest.
There's CR and CR. A paleo lifestyle will greatly increase natural tolerance to fasting, leading to longer periods without meals, up to one day at times. Deliberate CR is something different.
CR doesn't show up among blue zones or the world's oldest people. Rather, the opposite - enjoyment of life.
I read a chimp study that showed CR chimps lived longer but had terrible quality of life compared to the fat happy sly contented ad libitum eaters. That suggests it's a tradeoff between living longer slowly and living faster richly.
Longevity is extremely hard to study in humans and there are many better-established effects on health from altering biological inputs than anything related to longevity.
Most importantly, cages and unnatural diets may tend to exaggerate the positive effects of CR on animals. Now interestingly, many humans live in the modern equivalent of cages and eat highly unnatural diets...
Therefore, I reject your thesis that rejecting CR and pursuing supplementation is misguided.