< Tom Bri ([log in to unmask]) wrote > I don't really believe this [that 
the planet cannot support everyone eating a Paleo diet] will become a 
serious problem, mainly because there are so few people willing to give up 
their current diets wholesale. I don't eat a hunter's diet, just the 
closest I can get using agricultural products.

I agree it won't happen in the very near future, but it will in the longer 
term as the science becomes harder to ignore. At some point it must 
inevitably become a problem, as Cordain acknowledges in the appendix of 
The Paleo Diet. It took about 15-20 years for Atkins' diet to become 
popular, and Atkins only figured out part of the puzzle. My guess is that 
within another 20 years evolutionary nutrition and medicine will become 
fairly widely known. 

I don't eat a "hunter's diet" either. I mainly use the supermarket, though 
I sometimes fish and sometimes get some hunted meat and wild fruits from 
my brother-in-law. I noted the estimates of carrying capacity for hunter 
gatherers because they are the only numbers I know of that can serve as 
useful approximations of how many people could eat a supermarket 
approximation of the Paleo diet. If anyone has any additional numbers I 
would be pleased to see them.

Once the studies come out showing some people being essentially "cured" of 
what were thought to be incurable diseases by dietary change, there will 
be others scrambling to buy the foods that provided the "cure." There will 
be lots of people who would rather die than dramatically change their 
diets, just as there are many who continue to smoke despite the known 
risks, but it won't take a major shift to make the already expensive Paleo 
foods even more expensive. 

I know a young woman who had physician-diagnosed Grave's disease 
(hyperthyroidism)--a supposedly incurable disease--and had a total 
remission of symptoms just by eliminating gluten foods from her diet. Her 
specialist said she never has to see him again. When the studies start 
showing improvements like this, people will gobble up the Paleo foods. The 
problem is getting the studies funded, of course, but once a few studies 
report results and get in the mass media, people will clamor for more 
studies. It's hard to break into the mass media in a major way, of course, 
but my guess is the correct science will eventually rise to the surface.

> I see a gradual change happening. 

I agree, and as that change occurs the demand for Paleo (healthy) foods 
will increase. Eventually increase in demand will outpace increase in 
supply and the prices will rise--not for all foods, but for the Paleo 
foods, which are much more difficult to mass produce than the modern foods.

> Assuming we are right in our beliefs about food, eventually the science 
will catch up and the more offensive aspects of the modern diets will be 
reduced. We can see that happening already, as KFC and MacDonalds try to 
eliminate trans fats from their foods. A small step but maybe in the right 
direction.

Yes, and the UK is ahead of the US in eliminating the worst food 
ingredients, like trans fats. As I said, it may be possible to make 
gradual changes to society's diet, aiming for a realistic goal. Shooting 
for the foods of 1900 may be overreaching, but even if we could reduce or 
eliminate just the most egregious foods and food ingredients of the last 
50 years (like trans fats and loads of refined sweeteners) it would be a 
major improvement. And perhaps American society could be encouraged to 
replace gluten grains with gluten-free grains.

> Low fat diets are already on their way out, maybe because the science 
behind them isn't there, or maybe just because of changing diet fads. 

I wouldn't declare victory on that one quite yet. Dr. Dean Ornish has 
given another boost to low-fat diets with his research and misguided 
writings on his insanely low-fat diet. Ornish's work has been discussed in 
these fora.

> Small changes can make a big difference in peoples' health. Cutting out 
wheat and adding more fat made a big felt difference for me. I don't tell 
people about paleo, I tell them how much relief I got from migraines and 
painful joints after cutting out wheat. Small steps.

Same here. I don't even call it Paleo to the unitiated--it's too 
offputting. I refer to it as ancestral, natural, wild, the original diet, 
etc. But again, the biggest problem is not convincing other people, the 
biggest problem is that when enough people are convinced this will 
eventually have negative unintended consequences for Paleo dieters, 
because there simply are not enough Paleo foods--not even in the 
supermarkets--to feed even the industrialized nations, much less the total 
world population, and Paleo foods are not as prone to mass production as 
modern foods.