On Jun 16, 2008, at 10:08 pm, steve wrote:

> Humans first entered Europe about 45,000 years ago which might make  
> European native foods non-paleo as well.  In fact, everything  
> outside of Africa becomes non-paleo since immigration out of Africa  
> may have started no later than 50,000 years ago.
>
> The arguments against natural cocoa seem to be without substance.   
> Additionally, the different defenses that plants have that man has  
> evolved some resistance too did not suddenly appear when he started  
> immigrating out of Africa.

This is my thinking too.  Your body doesn't have an organ for  
digesting spinach, an organ for digesting walnuts, etc.  It has a  
stomach that breaks everything it can, and tries to extract the  
nutrients and neutralise the poisons.  I assume that the significant  
difference between plants is not the form the nutrients are stored in,  
but the nature of the poisons.  So if you can eat a certain plant  
without side effects, you've evolved to be able to eat it,  
irrespective of whether it was *that* plant that forced the evolution  
of that ability.  It's not surprising that many people have trouble  
with new world foods, but it's also not surprising that there are new  
world foods that most people *don't* have trouble with.

Ashley