> What if, indeed?  What if red meat is the cause of colon cancer,
> and so forth?  How do you propose to establish whether it is the
> consumption of grains or the overconsumption of grains that
> caused the cancer?  What if the carcinogen is not the grains but
> the aflatoxin that results from them being stored in large
> quantities -- something that happened only after agriculture.
>
> Again, I'm not trying to argue that people should or shouldn't
> eat grains, but I have a problem with the logic that forbids
> thems in absolute terms from paleo.
>
> The very fact that we have evidence of gathering grains as far
> back as 17,000 years ago makes me ask: Why then?  Am I to believe
> that people took up grain-eating at that time?  Why would they?
> But I have no trouble believing that people ate grains
> sporadically as soon as they moved into the habitats where the
> grains were.  In fact, I think the basic rule of human diet has
> been: exploit what's there to the maximum extent possible.
Good points.  You have to figure that at the point that we detect a use of a
particular food, that the use has gone on for a long time before the time
that we detected it...............
Paul

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