I do agree with Dean Esmay's point regarding the excerpt from my
in-progress book.  Alas, simplification is inevitable when one excerpts
material from more lengthy and complex content.  In emphasizing the
relatively low carbohydrate content of hunter-gatherer diets, and
particularly the seemingly low glycemic indices of their foods, I was
mounting an attack on a good deal of modern diet advice and not giving the
whole story.

The book will contain a discussion of the role of altered and foreign
substances in the diet and their connection to the Western Diseases, to the
extent there is credible research on these subjects.  Certain large
proteins do seem to be implicated in immune responses because they make
their way to the lower intestine where such responses are elicited.

I should like to put forth a proposition that seems to generalize and
contain the key points of the many models of Paleolithic living and modern
living.  It is this:

The paleolithic pattern is multidimensional; it encompasses diet and
activity, and it is not a steady state pattern, but one of adaptation and
novelty that accommodates variety of eating and activity patterns.  Diet and
activity cannot be understood adequately unless they are part of an
integrated model and analyses based on averages are misleading.  Averages
are but one moment of the whole distribution on a single axis in the
multidimensional space and are falsely predicated on normal or bell-shaped
distributions which living organisms fail to follow [they follow power
laws].  Averages and steady-state analyses can be highly misleading in
understanding a far-from-equilibrium living system.  A multidimensional,
dynamic model is essential for understanding the complex, self-organized
processes that are at work here.

Here is the maladaptation hypothesis within the dynamic framework. The
paleolithic pattern is an attractor in a multidimensional dynamic space and
this attractor lies some distance from the modern pattern.  The distance
between these two attractors is a measure of the degree to which
paleolithic humans are maladapted to modern life.

The implications of this view are far-reaching.  The fat axis, protein
locii, carb dimensions and so on are but a few subspaces of this large
dynamic pattern.  Projecting complex patterns onto these simpler subspaces
is useful, but also can be highly misleading.  Three or four macronutrient
component models of diet can be helpful, but are wholly inadequate for
understanding human nutrition (that is why the paleo model is so
appealing).  Diet is inadequate unless it is integrated with physical and
cognitive activity.

Arthur De Vany <[log in to unmask]>
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