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?