From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Apr 23 2003 - 12:25:42 MDT
Mike Lorrey wrote:
> The point of living a paleolithic diet is to live healthfully
> without modern interventionist techniques like supplements, caloric
> restriction, body building and aerobic training.
I'm glad to see another paleo-guy in this thread. I think that makes about
2.5 of us, where Eliezer seems to be the .5 :) (I'm still not clear about
what Eliezer really thinks, given that he keeps disagreeing with me even
while I keep trying to agree with him :-)
I agree in principle with what you've written above, but perhaps unlike you
I am not trying to "live" a paleodiet life-style. Like a lot of paleodiet
proponents I am not opposed to adding supplements and other non-paleo
substances to my diet when the evidence is strong that doing so is likely to
have benefits.
Perhaps the least paleolithic item in my diet is aminoguanidine. I take 200
mg per day of this extremely non-paleolithic chemical. I do so because
aminoguanidine is known to help prevent the production of Advanced Glycation
End-products (AGE's). Appropriately named, AGE's are implicated in many of
the diseases of aging, diseases which our paleo ancestors did not experience
much due to their shorter life-spans.
As mez points out, the forces of natural selection were blind to many of the
modern diseases of aging. For that reason we cannot rely only on pure
paleodiet theory to help us live longer. In terms of human evolution and
longevity we are now in completely uncharted territory.
In my view the paleodiet is, however, still the base diet upon which we
should formulate an optimal diet. Again, it's a question of burden-of-proof.
As I see it, any deviation from the paleodiet needs to be justified by solid
scientific evidence.
-gts
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