On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 15:33:46 -0600, Paleogal <[log in to unmask]>  
wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ken Stuart" <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Richard
> E. Nisbett argued in his recent book "The Geography of Thought." East
> Asians tend to be more interdependent than the individualists of the
> West, which he attributed to the social constraints and central control
> handed down as part of the rice-farming techniques Asians have practiced
> for thousands of years.
>
> False?  How so?  I didn't see that in this article. Oliva

I think the issue is that the paleo diet premise is that mankind is best  
adapted to a diet such as we subsisted on for the huge number of years  
prior to the invention of agriculture.   It has also been stated that the  
time elapsed since agriculture has not been long enough for mankind to  
adapt to the grains and legumes that came with agriculture.  The article  
says that mankind's genes *have* adapted to the "new" foods, and that if  
true, that calls into premise the adaptation reasoning.

I have wondered about this myself in reading some of the recent postings  
on this list (for example, that those of European ancestry may be better  
adapted to eating beef, yet European colonization was itself very recent  
in terms of our evolutionary history).  This is also shown in the studies  
by Weston Price -- the diets of all the micro-cultures he studied varied  
widely, including in some cases, large proportions of things that were not  
paleo, yet those people thrived on it.

It seems to pose the question of whether it is the foods themselves  
(grains, legumes, dairy, etc) that are at fault, or whether it is merely  
what we *do* to those foods that puts our health at risk (excepting of  
course food allergies etc.).

(I also think it's what we *don't* do with our *bodies* that leads to a  
lot of problems (ie lack of hard physical work and exercise on a routine  
bases), but that's probably off topic for this list.)


-- 
   Robert Kesterson
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