From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 12:37:46 MDT
> I believe we are as perfectly adapted to a paleo diet as a giraffe
> is perfectly adapted to eating the leaves from tall trees. In these
> threads, however, few people are willing to grant that 4,000,000
> years of hominid evolution has optimized the human genome for a
> prehistoric diet.
Nonsense--of course we grant that. We're not stupid. We're just
not so blindly devoted that we can't also see the /other/ valid
arguments against the paleo diet, which are just as strong:
(1) Evolution isn't so slow that the last 10,000 years are
irrelevant. Indeed, recentness of years trumps mere numbers.
After all, that giraffe spent 3 billion years adapted to
living in the ocean before the last few million on land.
Humans have been eating starchy tubers and grains for more
than enough time to acquire adaptations to them, and a
small subset of us (those of European descent mostly) have
even acquired adaptations to dairy.
(2) A diet optimized for the goals of our genes isn't
necessarily optimized for /our/ goals. Longevity is the
obvious example: our genes want to optimize our chances of
surviving long enough to reproduce. We want to optimize
useful lifespan. Those are very different things.
(3) Evolution may be smarter than we are, but even we can come
up with original ideas now and then that are useful and which
evolution missed. New foods are certainly among those, and
there's no legitimate reason to avoid individual new foods for
which there is ample evidence of nutritional benefit just
because they don't happen to fit into an overall theory.
(4) No matter how compelling the theory is, the proof is in
results, not theory. Paleodiet theory just hasn't yet been
subjected to the kinds of long-term controlled studies that
we'd like to see.
-- 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Apr 30 2003 - 12:48:13 MDT