One firstly must set ones goals.
My goal is to find the ideal diet.
Examining all the available diets is difficult as there are so many
different recommendations. But look at Pritikin, look at low fat (which
paleo is if you eat organic meat or game or fish), look at others..
If you take true paleo as your gold standard, you can see how each of the
other diets compares to the standard Western diet.- indeed most of the other
diets is an improvement going toward paleo somewhat. They are like pointers
on an obscured map, indicators helping us in the dark. They all point in a
certain direction.
Gather them all together, and triangulate and you will find the top of the
mountain- and the top of the mountain is the paleolithic diet. This also
explains why all these other diets work well for some people for some time.
Pritikin is great if you only want to reduce hear disease. Poor old Nathan
Pritkin died of cancer- the Pritikin diet is much lower in antioxidants than
the Paleo diet- but I think paleo is completely compatible with Pritikin.
Pritikin was right but he just didn't go far enough.
So, a diet that reduces risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke and
arthritis. That only leaves out depression, asthma, acne and a couple of
other diseases from the doctor's top 95% of workload. Maybe paleo can help
those too (what the heck, none of the other diets do!). Show me a diet that
addresses these even better and I'll try it.
People being well on various diets comes down to why diets are good or bad
for us. I use the theory of the good, the bad and the ugly. One must look at
the good things in the diet, the bad things in the diet and the ugly things
we add to it! And that's a very long answer that I can' do justice to today.
Not being formally trained in philosophy, I use (or misuse)Occam's razor in
a number of ways. The hardest way is simply to line up all of the
assumptions of the theory and work through them- only one has to be wrong to
capsize the entire theory. My father used to say that if a theory was wrong,
the mistake was usually made on the first page, and I think he's right.

No, I don't think I'm a fanatic, merely correct. My wife and children eat
normal food. (perhaps we should call it nawmal as there are so many awful
things in the normal diet!!)(Ray and Don, I propose that as a standard
nomenclature!). Maybe one day I'll get them to change.

Ben Balzer



----- Original Message -----
From: Wally Day <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, 14 July 1999 4:14
Subject: Re: [P-F] Occam's razor bites it


> Occam's razor is only a very limited tool which is
> supposed to be used to sort ideas and explanations
> during the formulation of theory or hypothesis, or
> when not enough data is available to even support a
> hypothesis. It is NOT a "proof" nor was it intended to
> be.
>
> That said, how does Occam's razor explain those folks
> who seem to do very well on a limited meat or meat
> free diet, and those who do poorly on a meat rich
> diet? Obviously there must be more to the story than
> "Natural is better" and "Natural = techo-free"
> therefore "Paleo is the answer".
> _________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com