Hi folks - great forum you have here. I've been following a paleo diet for a week now because I wasn't feeling well and thought I'd give it a go, not because I want to lose weight. I was already quite low on grains and sugar, so it's no huge change. I have already noticed an improvement to that post-prandial fatigue that wasted my afternoons. Also over the last years I've had a lot of joint pain in one leg (I'm only 37!!) and am wondering (against any scientific proof that I can find) whether gluten intolerance could have something to do with it. This brings me to my questions:

Although the basic concept of eating what we're evolved to eat makes sense, there seems very little scientific basis for some of the details. A short look at Quackwatch, British Medical Journal and other sites that offer scientific analysis makes me a bit wary of 'blood type' diets and other seemingly unproven methods. Though I guess any cost-free and not-too-disruptive idea can be worth following for a while as a personal experiment.

BTW Kypraia, I really admired your analysis of the population-growth and agriculture question, so maybe you'll have some insights on the following:

1. Although Weston's work on traditional diets is interesting, most of the really traditional ones he reports on relate to ethnic groups well away from Northern Europe. I don't find the 'Merry Olde England' report so useful, as it only looks a few centuries back. Can someone point me to articles really analysing the Northern European stone-age diet?

2. Northern Europeans didn't evolve in northern Europe. If our original genetic stock comes from Africa or the Middle East, should we be paying most attention to those areas? This would seem an important point: if we look at northern Europe only, we could assume that our mainstay was meat. As has been rightly pointed out, for at least half the year there wasn't much else to eat. However, maybe those of our ancestors who entered Europe weren't very healthy. Wouldn't they have suffered from scurvy and other vitamin deficiencies? If their (and thus our) ancestors evolved in more benign climates, fruits, nuts, vegetables and easily processed grains and legumes would surely have featured? And what about our cousins the apes? Don't they eat as much fruit as they can get their paws on and supplement it with insects and the occasional larger meat kill?

So, whom should we really consider our most logical reference peoples (or animals)?

3. What makes us believe that our distant ancestors (once we've decided which ones to consider) were healthy? What evidence is there that their health and life expectancy (disregarding accidents), were excellent?

Well, I look forward to some rigorous debate. BTW, I looked up what they feed apes in zoos, and you might be surprised how much soy and grain and sugar is in the bags of feed they market to zoos. Eg. check out the primates link at this site: http://www.mazuri.com/main.html. Does this mean they're wrong or we're wrong?

Hi, Lilith D!!

There are some good threads that discuss some of the questions you have, here, already. I wouldn't go by the nutritional analysis of the food they feed the poor captives in the zoos as a basis for good nutrition for that type of animal. The food that is marketed for our domestic animals is full of corn, and grain of all sorts, like rice and wheat. When was the last time a wolf ate a big helping of cornmeal mufins? Or, bobcat sat down to a "healthy" helping of Farina? Chimps and gorillas eat a diet made up of vegetable matter and protein from insects, and an ocassional monkey, now and then. Certainly, not grain products. Soy, incidentally, is poisonous in it's uncooked form. So are lima beas and many other lentil-like fruits. How can we expect the "experts" to know better? After all, these same "experts" are still trying to tell us that the good Dr. Atkins was a quack and on the wrong track...that his "diet" could cause heart attacks. That is what his "diet" was originally designed to fight! And, it does a great job of it, too.

There is a lot of evidence that our ancestors were healthier than we are, from the fossil record. We know that there is absolutely NO evidence of any of the auto-immune disorders that plague Mankind, today. Those disorders that can be determined from the bone record are cancer, diabetes, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and all arthritis forms, and a few others. That sort of says something, right there. And, it's not like we don't have a plethora of bones from the past, either. Archeologists and paleoanthropologists have unearthed tens of thousands of remains in the last 150 years. As well, modern anthropologists have studied the hunters and gatherers of our present era and have found similar results. These people just don't have auto-immune disorders. That's what this woe is all about. A little publicized fact is that most people, today die of an auto-immune disorder...not just "old age." Heart attacks, cancer, and most of the diseases people get in their old age are autoimmune disorders, thought by many experts to be caused by lifetime dietary habits. Of course, there are others who would vehemntly disagree with me. But, look at the record! When you really see why people die, aside from accidents, you will find that most die of a totally preventable auto-immune disorder. Fossil evidence points to the fact that, barring accidents and being eaten by a lion, our ancestors, prior to agriculture, lived as long as we do, today. And, today, we have modern medicines to keep us alive, even when our quality of life sucks!

A modern misconceptiion, promoted largely by the "vegan movement," a politically correct, liberal, agenda-based program is that apes and us have an "Identical" gut. Absolutely untrue! When the gut of humans is compared to any of the other primates, very obvious, and subtle differences pop out. They might look similar, at first glance, but there are major differences between us and our forest-dwelling cousins. Our humanoid ancestors began developing different food habits, based upon the necessity of moving out onto the savannah, about 3-5 million years ago...maybe even earlier. Fruit and vegetable matter wasn't as prevelant. That is why they became hunters and gatherers. So, there was a very long period of time for our gut to develop into what it is, today. Our bodies are designed to process animal proteins...vitamin B has to be processed from meat sources, and no other way in our bodies, for example. Only in the last 10,000, or so, years has Mankind been a grain-eater. Before that, grains just didn't exist in most of their forms that we take for granted, today. An animal eating an ocassional grass pod is very different than eating an ear of corn...that is the way it was before Mankind began genetically altering food sources back at the end of the last Ice Age. Warfare...the bane of "civilization," came about with the first city-states...created as permanant dwelling places for agriculture, incidentally. The most warlike peoples are those who dwell in permanant places. Hunters and gatherers just don't seem to be very warlike...the Bushmen, and Inuit are examples of recent times.

A very interesting study, in the early twenties, was done in the U.S. of hunter and gatherer diet. It was done by a man named Stephanson and a partner at, I believe, Harvard Medical School...I don't have the paper in front of me, at the moment...I wonder why? He was an arctic explorer who lived with the Inuit for quite some time in his adventures. He went on an all-meat diet for over a year, under medical supervision...at the end of the study, he and his partner were more healthy than when they started the program. They ate nothing but meat and fat...nothing else...just like the Inuit's origianal diet, before they became plagued with being "civilised." So, there is some evidence that there are no vitamin difficiencies when one eats just meat. He never contracted scurvy, and neither did the Inuit. Go figure.

There is a big difference between eating like our ancestors and eating a "blood-type" diet. Although, the type O diet is very similar to a paleolithic diet, the reasoning behind it is not quite the same. The doctor who developed this, based his diet upon the theory that, with the advent of agriculture, certain blood types developed. That is unsound by most scientific reasoning because populations don't evolve that quickly. It takes millions of years, not ten thousand. He admits that the type O diet was our first "diet," but he also allows some things that would never be allowed on my woe (Neanderthin).

Realise, too, that there are economic forces out there that have very strong reasons for keeping us on the diet that most of us eat. If grains and milk were to be discovered by the main population as very bad for us, the entire midwest of the U.S. would become a ghost town. At least, that's their fear. General Mills, Kellogg's, ADM..to name a few of the Blue Chips would need to seriously diversify, and quickly. Our economy would suffer, tremendously..world-wide. And there would be millions of people who would die (even though their life is rather unhealthy, they are still alive)...the world couldn't sustain its present population if we went to a paleolithic diet, again, without some major changes in agricultural practices. There is way more than enough surface to produce the protein sources necessary for a paleolithic diet for the general population of the world, but the technological changes that would be necessary to change the world dietary standards will never be changed that fast...especially, in the economically oppressed and depressed Third World. Mankind became so good at killing and eating the big game animals at the end of the Ice Age, that he made agriculture a necessity, even though it was unhealthy. Better to live than die, immediately. With the advent of agriculture, the population exploded...women became more fertile when they stopped moving from dwelling to dwelling and they began eating grains that improved fertility...girls started menses earlier...population grew and grew...we did it to ourselves!

Captxray, thanks for your extremely insightful comments and for taking the time to write them all down. I enjoyed reading everything you said. Good work!

Good luck with your first baby! I'm a grandfather, now, and wouldn't trade the experience of being a father with anything...

Thanks!