"your girl be one of those salad eating be-atches...."
a nice zinfandel
To me, diets and health initiatives that hark to "the wisdom of the ancients" etc always suffer from the problem that their followers generally die young. Neolithic man generally died at the age of around 30 - any diet only had to be good enough to get to breeding age. Why not follow the Masai diet instead - cows blood mixed with milk, or the Inuit diet of blubber and moss - those are pretty archetypal. Similarly, if Chinese herbal medicine is so great, then shouldn't China have a higher life expectancy than the likes of Bulgaria and Mexico?
Interestingly enough, the Inuit have almost 0 incidence of coronary artery disease and diabetes when following their TRADITIONAL diet, in which of course ~80% of the calories come from saturated fat. It is only after they switch to eating commodity foods like white flour, sugar, etc, that their incidence of diabetes and CAD shoot through the roof...
but is this (and i ask because i don't know and would like to, rather than as an expression of cynicism) because TRADITIONAL life expectancy in this group is too low for them to develop these conditions? With increased 'modernisation' you might think come increased provision for healthcare etc, increased life expectancy, and thus different causes of mortality. This is total conjecture, incidentally.
Which is what I believe Moose was saying above.The other thing missing from the whole paleo/primal shtick is we don't do the hunting or the gathering. Days on end hunting animals in the wild is a bit different to 8hrs as a keyboard warrior, a few weights three times a week and a skinfull on the weekend with the added bebefit of only have to hunt around Morrisons for 1 hr a week.
Back to diet though, the Paleo scheme does look to have some pretty sensible points. Not many people would argue that cutting down on heavily processed food is a bad idea. But, to be honest, the bits to take home just look like needlessly complicated common sense. A briefly famous dietician once said that everything he had learned could be summed up in seven words: "eat food, not too much, mostly plants". I'll go along with that....