Anna L. Abrante wrote:

>the Russian Georgians have some claiming over
>150yrs of age...proving it is very difficult as you can imagine, but the
>centurians have been proven.

Brian J. Mac Lean wrote on the PaleoDiet list: "It appears that such a
conclusion is questionable in that we now know that it is difficult to
ascertain birth dates due to faulty or absent record keeping and
dissimulation for cultural reasons.(1)"

1. Medvedev, Z.A. Caucusus and Atlay Longevity: A Biological or Social
Problem. The Gerontologist, 14:381, 1974.

>But even I can have certain grains with no problems at all.

But grain consumption has been linked to many things not evident until many
years of consumption have passed. Like cancer. See:

Lutz, W.J., "The Colonisation of Europe and Our Western Diseases", Medical
Hypotheses, Vol. 45, pages 115-120, 1995

Dr. Lutz, in the face of epidemiological studies that failed to support the
current belief that fat intake was at the root of coronary disease and
cancer, has done his own explorations of epidemiological data. His findings
show a clear, inverse relationship between these civilisatory diseases and
the length of time the people of a given region of Europe have had to adapt
to the high carbohydrate diet associated with the cultivation of cereal
grains that was begun in the Near East, and spread very slowly through Europe.

But this isn't new information. In

Vilhjalmur Stefansson's book _Cancer Disease of Civilization_ 1960; Hill
and Wang, New York, NY.

it points out that Stanislaw Tanchou "....gave the first formula for
predicting cancer risk. It was based on grain consumption and was found to
accurately calculate cancer rates in major European cities. The more grain
consumed, the greater the rate of cancer." Tanchou's paper was delivered to
the Paris Medical Society in 1843. He also postulated that cancer would
likewise never be found in hunter-gatherer populations. This began a search
among the populations of hunter-gatherers known to missionary doctors and
explorers. This search continued until WWII when the last wild humans were
"civilized" in the Arctic and Australia. No cases of cancer were ever found
within these populations, although after they adopted the diet of
civilization, it became common.

More recently Bruce Aimes of U.C. Berkeley published a series of articles
on cancer causation in the journal Science (#236,238,240) one of which
(in#238,Dec 18,1987) is titled "Paleolithic Diet, Evolution and Carcinogens".

Don.