>On Sat, 19 Jul 1997, Dean Esmay wrote:
>
>> Well, perhaps a considerable amount.  If there -are- some humans whose
>> systems have adapted them to having slightly different needs, it's probably
>> important to know that.  I may need to pick up D'Adamo's book....

Todd:
>I broke down and did just that.  It's quite interesting in that
>D'Adamo, like Audette and Gilchrist, claims that most
>diet-related problems are immunological in nature.  The core of
>his argument is this: <snip>

Thanks for the summary, Todd. I have been enjoying your musings/posts greatly.

It may be a heck of a lot more complex than D'Adamo or (certainly more so
than) Neanderthin presupposes. Each of us are unique in many more ways than
blood type. What works for one person may not work for another, or even the
same person at a different time. <-- if this is true then the rug is pulled
out from under every prescriptive diet, including Neanderthin and instincto
with their insistance of complete adherance to the regime and certain taboo
foods.

It seems that our cultural evolution (centrally including agriculture and
non-mammalian birthing/childrearing practices) has left is in a rather
mussed up situation as regards our species health and/or best-chance diet.
If we could snatch a pre-fire hunter-gatherer infant from a few hundred
thousand years ago, and, say, a late-paleo infant from 25,000 years ago,
and plunk both down in some Neilson family and fed them as SADly as the
average kid in the USA is fed today, how would they fare? What if we put
them on a paleo-diet, neanderthin or instincto? What if we put them on
either diet after decades of SAD? This (fanciful) experiment would probably
have to be done with many hundreds of infants plucked from the past before
it would have much meaning and even then I suspect it would be a matter of
percentages not of absolutes. (Traditional Eskimos have reportedly fell
apart much faster than "ordinary SAD folks" when they switched to a SAD
diet. Would a traditional Eskimo infant plucked from the igloo and raised
SAD also fall apart or would they do as "well" as the standard SAD kids of
today?)

More to the point, however would be to bring a few hundred modern infants
back in time to the late paleolithic and also to the pre-fire h&g days and
see how they fare. Would they thrive as no modern infant ever has? Would
they die early from disease? Would they be sickly in general? It would be
nice if we knew that the overwhelming base of our DNA correlates to a
pre-fire h&g diet, or that our DNA is finely-tuned to the late paleolithic
era?  It would be nice to know that no mutations of great significance have
occured since then, in which case we should all thrive on the various
versions of the paleo-diets. But it just doesn't seem to be the case, does
it? Let's feed a Great Dane or Chiwawah the wild diet of a healthy wolf
population? Certainly we don't expect the dog to become a wolf, or for it's
offspring to be a wolf. Perhaps more concretely: many modern breeds of
chickens, if left to scratch for themselves under "wild" conditions would
probably die. They appear to "need" a higher % of grains than they would
have in the wild; they've become so "domesticated" that their own ancestral
diet would not serve them well anymore. To what degree this has occured
with humans is very much open to debate, but to say that _everyone_ will
thrive on Neanderthin or instincto or grandma's cheese souffle can NOT be
true.

I can think of no more logical diet than a paleo-diet, but so what? What
does my logic know about the hundreds of generations of agriculture and its
affect on our genetics? Or about thousands of generations of cooking and
its effects? My understanding of evolution is that genetic change is quite
fast in response to new selective pressures, in response to a new
environment. I can think of fewer more radical environmental changes than
the use of fire for cooking and later the inclusion of grains and dairy in
the human diet. I suspect that plenty of humans were naturally selected
right out of the gene-pool in response to those novel conditions (new
molecules of food). Further, the selection pressures (the diets) varied
widely--not only amoung the h&g crowd, but between Italians, Thais, Incans,
etc etc etc. Given that most folks in the USA are a patchwork of several
genetic/cultural heritages, and that they embody a single roll of their
parent's genetic dice, the individual variation in the "ideal diet" MUST be
great, no?

In the end, one might have to figure it out for one's self simply by
finding out what works over time, gradually paying less attention to the
dictates of "diet experts" including the paleo-diets. And the only way one
can find that out is to experiment. Grains and junk foods are logically off
limits, for me personally, but beyond that if I ever do find the perfect
diet for me, one thing I won't do is tell everyone else in the world that
it is the perfect diet for _them_. Or that there are _four_ perfect diets...

There are no perfect diets, and each of us has their very own not perfect
diet ;)

Cheers,
Kirt

Kirt Nieft / Melisa Secola
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