On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, Hans Kylberg wrote:

> One way to handle the question of what vegetabilian food to eat
> is to exclude using the naked/stick/stone idea, but this does not
> address the "new world" issue. Trying to do that, we need to determine
> what is really the "old world"? Is it more than Africa? Is it perhaps
> only the african savanna?

Good point.  We can't answer this without answering the question
"How old is old enough?"  I don't expect there will a simple
answer to this question anytime soon.  Furthermore, there is no
reason why the scope of the question should be restricted to
vegetation.  If all animal proteins were equal there would be no
question about avoiding bovine casein but not the casein in human
breast milk.  People *do* have immune reactions to various meats,
eggs, shellfish, etc.

> Is it better to take some chances with such things as tomatoes and
> bananas and eat a varied diet than to have only a few species to
> choose from?

In those cases where one's reaction to a food is quickly and
obviously bad, no further reason is needed to exclude it from the
diet, whether it is "paleo" or not.  Beyond that, it gets rather
tricky.  There is probably no food that does not present some
risk to some people, and in some cases the problems might take
years to be noticeable.  One might, as someone recently
suggested, avoid those foods to which a substantial percentage of
people have a bad reaction, but even this calls for some
extensive guessing as to how large the percentage should be, and
how the bad reactions are identified and quantified.
Furthermore, we would need to use epidemiological data for this,
but such data make it difficult to factor out the significance of
nondietary factors.

It might make sense to just eat the tomatoes and if you feel okay
don't worry about it.  But I suppose if that makes sense for
tomatoes it also makes sense for grains, legumes, etc.

Todd Moody
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