Hello Philip,

I don't really believe this will become a serious problem, mainly because
there are so few people willing to give up their current diets wholesale. I
don't eat a hunter's diet, just the closest I can get using agricultural
products.

I see a gradual change happening. Assuming we are right in our beliefs about
food, eventually the science will catch up and the more offensive aspects of
the modern diets will be reduced. We can see that happening already, as KFC
and MacDonalds try to eliminate trans fats from their foods. A small step
but maybe in the right direction.

Low fat diets are already on their way out, maybe because the science behind
them isn't there, or maybe just because of changing diet fads. Small changes
can make a big difference in peoples' health. Cutting out wheat and adding
more fat made a big felt difference for me. I don't tell people about paleo,
I tell them how much relief I got from migraines and painful joints after
cutting out wheat. Small steps.

Population does not worry me much any more either. So many countries are now
nearing negative numbers for population; all of Europe, Russia, Japan, are
going to be losing population in the coming decades. Even most of the
middle-income countries are nearing stable populations. Besides, we are
nowhere near producing as much food as we could if population were to
continue to grow. Food is cheap and getting cheaper all the time, even if
much of it is low-quality grain. This aspect of the future is looking more
optimistic every year. After we get most of the world eating the basics we
can worry about maximal quality diets.

I live in the middle of ag country. How much land is given over to producing
the fruits and vegetables we eat? Very little compared to grains. Switching
from grain-fed animals to grass fed on that land would not be much of a
problem. Feeding grains adds some efficiencies, but takes away others. In
many ways grass-fed is more efficient. The reason farmers moved to grain
feeding was political, not economic, the government controls grain prices,
making grain cheaper to feed than grass. The problem is to convince the
government to stop doing this, and in a few years farmers would stop feeding
grain so much, except for high-end specialty meats. Consumers want the end
product, meat, and don't much care how it gets to the table.

A long post, and enough for today. This has been posted about several times
in the last few years.

Tom

On 11/18/06, Philip <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> World Too Overpopulated to Support Paleo Diet
>
> The biggest problem that the facts of Paleolithic/evolutionary nutrition
>
> poses is that the planet cannot support everyone eating a Paleo diet. I
>
> have seen estimates of the carrying capacity of the planet ranging from
>
> 250,000 to 100 million hunter-gatherers.