Is it too much of a stretch to postulate that maybe paleo people actually
had fewer negative dietary responses to what they gathered and ate than what
modern peoples do today?  Before the advent of agri-chemical pest control,
the seeds from naturally resistant plants/strains were an important means of
producing more than bugs could eat (or diseases decimate).  Open-pollinated
plants will readily cross-breed and produce their own mutations for better
or worse, but hasn't nature had a great helping or hurting hand from humans
who have selectively bred  for resistant qualities that actually increase
such things as phytate or lectin levels?  Isn't it phytates that are
supposed to deter bugs from eating the grain?  Or is it lectins?  I can't
remember just now.  Could salicylates or other potential offenders also fit
this profile?  Could we be responsible for some of the chronic diseases of
civilization or allergic/intolerant/non-adaptive responses to certain foods
because we have tinkered with the genes so much that they are different from
their plant ancestors and way different from what our earliest fully human
ancestors ate?   Maybe 10,000-17,000 years is long enough to have at least
some adaptation/tolerance, but not if we keep altering the nature of the
foods we consume.

Reading the ADHD article made me think more about this since the father
noted several times that some foods that were tested several times over
elicited wildly different repsonses in his son.   What comes to my mind is
that there's not just one single kind of generic rice that comes in plastic
bags at the grocery store.  Sometimes we know what variety we're buying, but
most often not.   Farmers have choices and preferences for what they grow,
and each strain is a little different.  Or on any day of the week, I can
choose between two different varieties of fresh spinach at the grocery
store.  They're both spinach, but they're each different in leaf shape,
size, color, and taste.  A seed catalog gives me even more choices of
varieties of vegetables and grains, sometimes almost unbelievable numbers of
choices for each fruit and vegetable.  Isn't it possible that a person could
react to one kind of  spinach and not to another or even three other kinds.
Or to the starch in 6 different varieties of carrots but not to the starch
in 8 other varieties?   Or maybe there's something in addition to gluten (or
maybe lacking in modern grains) that causes problems for people?  As I've
mentioned before, wheat gives me a reaction but rye doesn't seem to (though
I choose not to eat grains at all).  Grocery stores don't usually stick a
label above produce saying what variety the eggplant or red lettuce is.  Or
what variety out of at least a dozen different varieties a pecan is.  Or
what variety a walnut is.   What about allergies to meats?  Could the breed
make a subtle but very important difference as far as whether there's a
reaction or not?  Maybe it wasn't just the amines in that fish and poultry.
Maybe it was the variety of fish or breed of chicken that gave different
results.  (And allergy testing is notorious for missing things that people
self-report reacting to.)  Anyway, for someone who's trying to do
elimination testing, the picture gets way beyond complicated, I think.

Theola