List Members-

I've found the discussion about alcohol illuminating, though at times,
unfortunately, it falls into the rancor of a debate between "true believers"
and "heretics."

IMHO, the treatment of alcohol in Neanderthin has always fallen short of
rigorous. The whole "yeast urine" thing, while amusing, fails to address
basic facts on the ground which strongly suggest that yeast and fermentation
products have almost certainly been parts of the human diet since long
before we qualified for the "sapiens" label. Equally certainly, there has
been enough evolutionary time to allow complete adaptation to low-level
exposures, such as would *routinely* be found in ripened fruit.

Personally, I've read most of the works relating alcohol to a reduction in
heart disease, made my peace with their rigor (or lack thereof) and with a
family history of heart disease, I feel it's worth the trade-off for me to
have two glasses of wine a night.  Yes, it increases (very slightly) the
risk of other diseases such as cirhossis of the liver. On the other hand,
since I was a tea-totaller till I was 34, I don't know that there's time
enough in my normal lifespan for those slight additional risks to rise high
enough actually produce significant illness, much less to offset the
prospective protective effect of somewhat thinner blood that's less prone to
clotting, and a slight lowering of an already overly active immune system.

A recent poster said something that I found more disturbing than the debate
itself, however, which was:

> You do not really need any justification at all to  abstain. Combining
junk science and >unrelated fragments of information does not strengthen a
conviction but seems to give it an >unrelible foundation. The label of Paleo
or not is determined only by Mr. Audette, by >definition.

First, I think it's unreasonable to assume that people who are interested in
moderate consumption of alcohol, and who've raised questions about it here
can accurately be characterized as incipient drunks in desperate search of a
"paleo justification" in order to continue their dissolute ways.  I find the
whiff of fanaticism in those responding in such tones of trenchant
dissaproval, which makes me wonder what *they* are trying to justify or
sell.

Second, people with interests in evolutionary theories, especially as they
relate to behavior, should not be hurling around epithets like "junk
science." I know many people in the scientific community who would put the
entire *field* of ancestral nutritional studies into that convenient little
basket. The fact is, it's an ongoing field of research, with spotty data,
and a great deal of supposition, but the research is going on within normal
scientific channels all the time, with peer-review, and so forth. (In fact,
'junk science' is a political term without meaning in scientific research.
Some research reveals more about the way things work than other research
does, but as long as the scientific method is adhered to, it's not "junk."
Let's not forget something: Even with the "gold standard" of scientific
exploration, which is the 95% confidence level, it means that one in twenty
studies -though perfectly designed- will come up with a finding that is
wrong, and it could as well be in the first run as in the last.

My view of evolutionary dining is this: given that we can't go back and
*watch* what our ancestors ate, and given that we're no longer the kind of
regional purebreeds we were, a large  element of experimentalism is
unavoidable.  That experimentalism is best fostered by the free and
unfettered exchange of ideas, the review of all available data, and,an open
mind. Dogmatism, cultism, and letting moralisms bias one's reason are all
inimical to an experimentalist approach.

Finally, while I know this list is derived from the work of Mr. Audette,
whose book I enjoyed and found quite interesting, but I didn't think that
this list was some kind of personality cult, where people can't diverge from
the dogma of the founder.  Studies of ancestral diet *long* predated Mr.
Audette's book (if not his life), and just because a new label has been
slapped on that research, and a new populist work communicates and renames
it "paleonutrition" does not suddenly give that writer ownership of
everything subsumed in the new label.

Off the soapbox,


Ken Green