On Mar 08, 2007, at 10:57 pm, Paleo Phil wrote:

> As Todd mentioned, the sharp stick test doesn't apply to everything  
> (peanuts
> can be eaten raw, for example).

Great, I ask one litle thing about tomatoes and end up losing the  
only practical benchmark for deciding if I should eat a food!  In  
future I will keep my mouth shut :)

A guy I work with is going to try paleo for (hopefully) 6 weeks to  
see if it can help him lose weight.  I told him it's easiest to say  
what you can't eat, but before I'd come out with "grains, dairy  
foods, legumes, sugar and processed foods" (did I miss anything?)  
he'd come back and said it's easy enough to list the things you can  
eat - meat, veg, fruit, nuts (did he miss anything? - I'm counting  
eggs as meat)

The problem is I now have no idea how to define vegetable, I'm not so  
hot on fruit, and I'm fairly sure I could find something I call a nut  
that is contentious.  I think I'm safe with meat, although some of  
the things I buy from Tesco make me question that.  (And I'm not even  
thinking about Bernard Matthews Turkey-Ham now.)

It's a fairly serious problem from the point of view of promoting  
paleo.  Another guy I work with once said "it all sounds a bit like  
the Bible, you can interpret it any way you like".  Now, while he  
almost certainly said that as a way of avoiding giving it serious  
consideration (and if I'd slogged my guts out for months on the  
Testosterone Advantage Plan, I wouldn't be happy if someone told me I  
could lose weight permanently with no effort), he does highlight an  
issue.

I can't think of any way you can get someone to eat paleo without  
them having to start thinking about what they eat.  Now this would be  
a Good Thing, if it was even remotely possible.  But most people are  
lazy, and expect every diet to give them a new number (or a few  
numbers) to keep in a certain range.  Grams of fat/carbs/cabbage,  
hours between meals, number of meals, number of varieties of cabbage  
in each meal, all of these are carefully prescribed by at least one  
diet book.  All diet books that either make you fat or would kill you  
if you kept to them, but at least they increase your weight/speed of  
passage to the underworld in a simple, easy-to-follow fashion.

I like to think that after 3 years eating paleo, and a lot of time  
spent on this list and my own group, I know enough to show someone  
how to eat paleo.  I don't *really* of course - because I wouldn't  
last a week if I was stranded somewhere with a (now retired from food  
testing duties) sharp stick.  But I know more about food than most  
doctors, so hey, I must be good.  Even now, it takes me days, weeks,  
even months to explain paleo to people who show an interest.

Anyone got any ideas on how to sort out this mess?  Should we try to  
make paleo seem really simple in order to make it more accessible,  
and risk it being reduced to Atkins?  Or make more effort to explain  
that it's really hard to know what to eat, and that it was once a  
really important thing to learn, and risk having everyone ignore it?   
Right now it's somewhere in the middle, and it's exposed to potshots  
from opportunists like the guy I work with.

End rant, that took a bit longer than I thought :)

Ashley