re: Switching to vegetarian diet

After watching forks over knives a few months ago, I switched to a mainly plant based diet of freshly cooked foods and cut my dairy by 90%. I've dropped 25 lbs without exercise, feel better and sleep better than I have in years, along with other benefits like blood pressure and cholesterol improvements.

I don't preach to anyone and I love meat, but this is working for me and it's pretty easy outside of the social aspects.

I actually had time to go back a read the first article linked called Why you can all stop saying meat eating fueled evolution of larger brains right now

The author, though right on a number of points, is entirely wrong when it comes to ketones. The comments are picking apart his argument.

In the comments he posted this jewel.

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But the brain itself is different -- ketones will only replace glucose use only after long periods of starvation. That's a nice adaptation when food is scarce that I'm not discounting, but it's not really ideal long-term (also since ketone accumulation can lead to ketoacidosis). I wouldn't consider that "efficient". Here's the thing: I certainly understand that a ketogenic diet might have some uses (such as in epilepsy) or even for weight loss.

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Ketone accumulation does not lead to ketoacidosis or I'd been dead yrs ago.

The next comment was gold

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That's definitely what the biochemistry and nutrition textbooks will tell you.

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then goes on to explain why he is wrong.

David Despain had no idea what he was talking about in regards to ketosis. I believe in the same comment someone mention that being in a state of ketosis and using ketones to fuel the brain is *more* efficient, I happen to agree with that hypothesis.

As to the article Ancient Oat Discovery May Poke More Holes in Paleo Diet

The author bases the whole article on one study about a rock tool which had grain studs in it. She used a ton of suggestive language.
Here is the study in full text. The point here is that this study shows us that man used a tool to grind oats and how agriculture emerge, earlier than we previously thought. That is all.

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The idea that prehistoric people didn’t eat grain “is just wrong. It’s misinformed,” says Huw Barton of Britain’s University of Leicester, who studies ancient starch grains. “People ate what they could get their hands on. Eating is surviving.”

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They didn't. The study she provides only shows dates on when agriculture started, not that man ate grain while foraging, which she suggests.

Back to the study itself...

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The production of flour requires multistep processing and manipulation before cooking, depending on the different parts of the plants used. Grinding requires a previous drying of the plant portion to be processed, and drying may be accelerated by means of heat treatment. The present analysis indicates that the inhabitants of Grotta Paglicci (sublayer 23A) were the most ancient population to use a method that involves at least four subsequent steps in preparing plants for consumption. The examination performed on the Paglicci pestle-grinder provides direct evidence of heating and grinding. Although there is no direct evidence of the following steps, namely the mixing of the flour with water and the cooking, these processes can be plausibly hypothesized because the rehydration is necessary for cooking and the cooking is necessary to make the starch digestible

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I wonder why they went through the trouble processing, grinding, heating, rehyrating...

It does not show that man can digest oats or grains as efficiently as herbivores (in fact, it shows that considerable processing is necessary to digest it).

Though I find the study fascinating and a decent read, that article takes us off the point of nutrition and digestion, and to the point of when agriculture started. It has no context in which I presented my argument.