First, by the way, to all: I'm happy to be back on this discussion list
after about a two year hiatus. I enjoyed my discussions with people here
back in '99 and '00. Hello especially to Tom Moody (sp?) and jean-claude,
who might still remember me if I could only remember the email address I was
using back then. My name is Gordon, in case that rings a bell.

Tom Bridgeland wrote:

[gts wrote:]
>> Clearly cocoa products are not paleo. Cocoa is a New World food. 
 
> So what exactly is our standard? Or do we even have an agreed
> upon standard? Neanderthin suggests the "naked with a stick"
> standard...

I think it is incorrect to call the "naked with a stick" rule a "standard."
The stick rule is not intended to be a final standard or test of what is or
is not paleolithic. It is merely a simple rule of thumb proposed by Audette,
the author of Neanderthin, to help people with little knowledge of human
evolution to make decisions about diet. The stick rule works well 95% of the
time but like all rules of thumb it is not perfect. It is merely an
approximation of the true standard. 

The true scientific standard for paleodieting would be something like this:

"Eat only those foods to which you are genetically adapted, where genetic
adaptation is defined as having occurred before at least approximately 12
thousand years ago, at the end of the Paleolithic and before the dawn of
agriculture and animal husbandry." 

By this standard none of us are genetically adapted to cocoa. Even modern
descendants of the Aztecs cannot say they are adapted to cocoa, despite the
fact that Aztecs were likely the first consumers of it. Cocoa was first
consumed, at the *very* earliest, by the ancestors of the Aztecs about 8 or
10 thousand years ago when the first American humans migrated southward to
Central America. Most likely cocoa has been consumed by native Americans for
a few thousand years, and probably much less than that.

> You seem to be arguing that I should only eat foods native to northern
europe. 

No, that is not my argument. I am arguing that one should eat only those
foods that were present in the human diet for many tens of thousands of
years, and preferably hundreds of thousands or millions of years. This would
include almost all "stick rule" foods native to Africa, Europe, and the
Middle East. For people of Asian descent it would include "stick" foods
native only to Asia. 

Foods native *only* to the Americas cannot be truly paleolithic for anyone
on the planet. The Paleolithic period ended about the same time that humans
first migrated to America. We have not had enough time to adapt to them,
anymore than we have had time to adapt to agriculture.

That said, I grant that it is not totally unreasonable for
non-paleodiet-purists to consume New World foods like cocoa if those New
World foods are related very closely to foods consumed by our true
paleolithic ancestors. In many ways we are forced to do this, as plants and
animals have also evolved since paleo times. However I don't know of any
close cousin of cocoa that was consumed by any of our paleolithic ancestors.
It's a pretty strange food, actually. Among other things it is poisonous to
dogs, man's best friend since paleo times.


-gts