Diets come and go more often than Ice ages and the newest diet fad on everyone's tongue - the Paleo diet - has food detesters gnawing on fossilized bone marrow and sabertooth steaks, or deer stomachs or yak blood or whatever our hairy ancestors apparently ate - just as long as it isn't GRAIN or DAIRY because both contain the trapped souls of our diseased offspring.
But seriously. The premise of the paleo regime is that humans need to return to our ancestral diet and eat the foods that predate agriculture - namely, the fruit, vegetable and meat that hunter-gathering cave-persons would have eaten- never mind the fact that agriculture is as unavoidable these days as kicking the bucket when you choke on that final piece of proverbial liver meat, nor that not a single paleo diet warrior spends their free time gathering wild edibles on the side of the freeway. Nevertheless, advocates claim this is what we have evolved to eat, and is therefore our only path to righteous health enlightenment. Meanwhile, the modern diet victims stuffing their faces with processed carbohydrates will slowly degenerate into oblivion.
The paleo diets gets a few things right. A diet that shirks processed foods - anything in pretty packaging with unpronounceable ingredients in the middle aisles of the grocery store - in lieu of vegetable matter and plant proteins certainly can't be that far off base. But hey, ever heard of the Atkins Diet? Same damn thing, just different packaging.
But the Paleo diet bans more than just highly processed pseudo foods-in its most hardcore form (go big or go extinct) it prohibits any kind of food unavailable to stone age hunter-gatherers, including dairy rich in calcium, grains chockfull of fiber, and essential vitamins and legumes packed with protein. This is all based on the half-baked logic that our bodies never evolved to eat these evil substances and are thusly the main progenitors for heart disease, diabetes cancer and "modern" diseases that didn't exist before we learned how to grow corn from those damn natives.
How terrifying. But we wouldn't be able to sit in our offices, and preach our diet scripture to anyone if it wasn't for the agricultural revolution that allowed us to tap sunlight, store it in grains and enjoy it through the harsh winters. Not to mention Beer.
One message I received from a very angry paleo dieter/ facebook stalker read after my article defending gluten read: "Take even an anthropological stand point, humans didn't get fat until after the agricultural revolution. Wheat carbs are so unnecessary to human health its ridiculous. Not to mention detrimental."
This is the reductionist viewpoint that plagues the paleo diet. How long after the agricultural revolution did we get fat? Immediately? And what paleo predecessors are we talking about here. The truth is, 5,10,20,000 years ago, humans were doing anything they could to survive. If you lived in Mesopotamia you subsisted on grains as the main staple of your diet (you should see how fat they were). If you lived anywhere other than the America's you were probably herding ungulates and subsisting largely on their milk, and meat, but you were most definitely growing crops for their multiple stomachs and your simply man stomach as well. But there simply wasn't 'one' or even 'several' paleo diets. The human body is a marvel of evolutionary adaptation and most cultures adapted to the regional and locally available resources.
But you weren't healthier because of it. Our "modern diseases" may not have been as prevalent but shortened life expectancies, atherosclerosis, food borne infections, and the like plagued our paleo ancestors like dietary Russian roulette.
Even if eating only foods available to hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic made sense, it would be impossible. As Christina Warinner of the University of Zurich emphasizes in her 2012 TED talk, just about every single species commonly consumed today-including fruits, vegetables and animals-is drastically different from its Paleolithic predecessor to the point that they are almost different species. In the same amount of time it took us to get ridiculously fat from our totalitarian agriculture, we transformed the species we eat through Mendelian genetic selection. Sorry Bill and Ted, at the end of the day you're stuck in the present day with the rest of us eating domesticated salad greens, tubers, corn and broccoli - nutritionally distant from their Paleolithic counterparts, but so, so much more delicious.
And lastly the fallacy in the idea that grains make us fat is nothing more than a case of American Exceptionalism. Mark Twain said that surely an ant living in an orchard doesn't wake up in the morning, look around his puny hill and think 'my what a vast universe I live in', but everyday Americans assume that the sun revolves around New York City. We are the only culture that could be described as fat - obesity rates in America are 3 times higher than those in other countries. And while we're shoving gluten down the drains like it's a cancerous tumor, children are being bombed in Syria while waiting in line for bread - the only source of nutrition they have.
In the end no one cares what you eat, or even why you eat it. You're not better than anyone because your restrictive diet makes it impossible to share a god damn pizza with you. Eat what you want, but keep it to yourself and mind your manners because we're all going to be prehistoric in no time any way.
Sources:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-paleo-diet-half-baked-how-hunter-gatherer-really-eat/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rethinking-the-paleo-diet-would-you-eat-the-contents-of-a-deers-stomach-180947685/
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/executive-living/food-drink/stone-rage-the-paleo-diet/story-e6frg8jo-1226822912105
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