From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Wed Apr 23 2003 - 19:05:09 MDT
> > It's worse than that--even his imaginary story isn't really
> > helpful. The fact is, Mr. Hugh M. Species did not do "just
> > fine" on fish, fowl, etc. In fact, he was probably near
> > starvation most of the time, and just managed to reproduce
> > once or twice before dying in his twenties of disease or
> > injury.
>
> You're missing the point, Lee. In those pre-medical-science times,
> that was doing just fine.
I'm not missing anything. Yes, of course that was "just fine" for
him. My point is that the evidence for loss-of-health after the
advent of agriculture is harder to interpret and far more equivocal
than you make it out to be. There's no clear and meaningful measure
of "health" that was good before agriculture and bad afterward,
and no clear way to control such an analysis. There are lots of
tantalizing data points here and there to suggest that. And there
are lots of data points (for example, life expectancy) that were
bad before and good after, because life before agriculture was
pretty miserable all around. Now it's perfectly reasonably for you
to hypothesize that most of the post-ag improvements can be
explained away by factors other than choice of foods, and that's
probably even true. But the data just aren't nearly as clear or
reliable or one-sided as you make them sound.
And even if I totally accept your choice of data and interpretations,
it still doesn't necessarily follow that the diet serves /my/ goals,
even if it does serve my /genes/'s goals.
The paleo diet is a very good theory from which to come up with
actual tests to try. And it also has another great benefit: unlike
taking the latest popular diet craze or supplement that shows promise
before the results are in, there's a few million years of history
suggesting that the paleo diet is at least unlikely to be harmful, so
it's probably safe to do it while waiting for the studies to come in.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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