Cookaholics Bulletin Board

This was just too good not to share on this board. I published a reasonable, well-referenced discussion of the Paleo Diet as the EYB Blog yesterday and someone (whom we all know and love) posted this as a constructive comment:

"I'm all for the paleo diet, I just don't think that people are taking it far enough. None of the paleo dieters I know are eating live grubs, rotting carrion, raw organ meats or much of anything in the way of raw roots, leaves and stems -- let alone fasting for 11 days while hiking cross-country naked and barefoot. Get with the program, people! Make your flint-knapping ancestors proud!"

P.S. I loved it

Awesome! I'm not sure I believe in reasonable discussions of Paleo, but I'll give you the benefit of a doubt and read it

Lindsay,

So, conspiracy theory time: have you noticed that whenever vegetarianism starts getting popular in the US again (which seems to be whenever we have a recession), a high-meat fad diet pops up? One could suspect that the American Meat & Dairy Council has a very saavy marketeer in their ranks ...

What I wonder is -- what part of the 2 million years of the Paleolithic era are we talking here? That covers a pretty large variety of climates and available foodstuffs.

JB,

I think they're talking Quest For Fire.

I'll have what Fred & Wilma are having......................

While I do not entirely disagree with the Paleo diet or claims that Cooking meat made us human, anthropologists fail to discuss the fact that human populations exploded on this planet when the agricultural age allowed a reliable source of relatively safe liquid libation in locales with high population densities.

It’s beer, wine and distilled spirits that made us human. If the Paleo diet is only a passing fad, the required sobriety could be the cause. There are only so many cups of Rooibos that one can stand each week.

Fuzz,
Not Jean Auel Paleo, then. They ate plenty of grains and got their drink on fairly often.

Actually I believe quite a few anthropologists have spent considerable time on that very topic, and came to the same conclusion as you. Liquid libation made a lot of water safe to drink. As an example I've come across (safe, not anthropologists), reading The Ghost Map (fabulous book!), one of the interesting points that helped tip off the fact it was a water problem was that the employees of the distillery did not get ill (they got a portion as part of their employment and was the primary source of liquid refreshment)

JB,

I believe the idea of the Paleo diet is "eat like a hunter-gatherer". This arises from a belief that hunter-gatherers were more healthy than modern Americans (dubious) and more healthy than medieval Europeans (fairly well proven). Of course, that's completely ignoring the tremendous amounts of exercise that hunter-gathers got (think walking 10-15 miles a day), and that their low population densities and lack of livestock resulted in low rates of diseases. Oh, and also their high infant mortality tended to mean that people who survived past 3 years old had pretty strong constitutions.

It's gotten a big kick in the pants lately from the anti-gluten people, who are part of a 200-year-old American tradition of obsessing about bread.

The Paleo diet "works" the same way Atkins, Pritkin, and the Grapefruit Diet work: by creating an extremely restrictive list of what you can eat, they make eating such a chore that your caloric intake goes down.