Hi Ginny,

All very good observations. There are varing degrees of 'paleo-ness'.
If you wanted to adopt a strictly paleo diet, you could indeed ban
all Solanaceae from your diet... but then you'd have to ban butter
too.

Turnips and beets are out because of the antinutrient load contained
in the uncooked product. Turnips are thyroid inhibitors -- take an
iodine supplement if you eat a lot of turnip.

I can't find a reference to the problem with beets... I seem to
recall beet greens, like spinach, are high in oxalic acid, and best
eaten cooked. Anecdote: last time I ate a raw beet I had stomach
cramps for two days :)

Ray posted a quote from Loren Cordain some time ago regarding root
vegetables. I'll reproduce it here to save you a trip to the archive:

"Based upon studies of present day hunter-gatherers, our ancestors
almost certainly ate the tubers (storage roots) of many plants.   These
roots include  raw, edible rhizomes, corms etc of a wide variety of
plants.   The main tubers of agricultural man (potatoes, sweet potatoes,
yams, cassava etc) are inedible without cooking because of their high
anti-nutrient load and their storage form of carbohydrate.   These
tubers contain huge amounts of poorly digested starch which becomes
more digestible during cooking.  Additionally many, but not all
antinutrients are denatured or reduced with cooking and/or processing
(soaking in water or leaching in alkaline solutions).   The difference
between wild edible roots and commercially available starchy tubers is
that, the starch content is generally much lower in wild roots and there
tends to be more stored sachharides and less toxic antinutrients.
Examples of domesticated roots which certainly should be a part of a
-modern paleolithic diet- would include carrots, beets, parsnips,
radishes, daikon, turnips or any other non-starchy root which is edible
and non-toxic in its raw state.   Potatoes are clearly inedible in their
raw state and there have been more than 30 deaths reported in humans in
this century from eating raw potatoes (Slanina P.  Solanine
(Glycoalkaloids) in potatoes: toxicological evaluation. Fd Chem Toxic
1990 28:759-61.)."


Vinegar? I generally allow vinegar in my diet in very small
quantities. It's been mentioned on this list before that vinegar would
have been consumed by hunter-gatherers (when eating fruit just starting
to turn). I would probably feel better about vinegar if I had brewed it
myself... I don't trust stuff that comes in bottles or packets. Some
of my homebrew almost passes for vinegar... maybe I should use that!

As always, it's your diet, and you can do what you want with it :)
Sounds like you're way up there on the paleo-scale already.

   ...R.