I became interested in the concept of a Paleolithic Diet in a circuitous
way which began with the diagnosis of my oldest son with multiple sclerosis
two and a half years ago. I hit the med library soon after I was told that
there was no known cause and no effective treatment for MS. My goal was to
determine the most likely cause and to then devise a therapy which
countered this cause. After reading hundreds of papers and countless more
abstracts I reached the conclusion that the main cause of MS is dietary and
that dairy, gluten and saturated fat were the three main offending foods. I
have summarized this analysis in an essay which is at
http://aspin.asu.edu/msnews/emb11297.htm

The  file is about 120k and I'll be glad to email it to anyone who wants it. It
contains about 75 references to the published literature and is about a
year out of date.

The evidence I used to reach my interpretation was a combination of
epidemiology, theory (molecular mimicry) and anecdotal data. After the
essay was on the web I was contacted by Loren Cordain who pointed out that
the foods implicated in MS were "recently introduced" to the human diet
from a genetic point of view and he gave me the references to Boyd Eaton's
classic papers on Paleolithic Nutrition. From my geological background this
concept seemed eminently reasonable so now I had an excellent unifying
concept to go along with all the other data. One shortcoming of the
evidence was that it was all circumstantial. There was no "smoking gun"
evidence, that is, empirical evidence
which demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that food proteins really do
cause cell-mediated, organ-specific autoimmunity.

As a dutiful civil servant, I made one of my required pilgrimages to Ottawa
last week to participate in various mind-numbing meetings. I had a free
afternoon so I went out to the Nutrition Research Division of Health Canada
where I had the good fortune to meet with Dr Fraser Scott. Dr. Scott has
been studying the effect of diet on the development of Type 1 Diabetes in
BBdp rats for 20 years. He and co-workers have demonstrated conclusively
that Type 1 diabetes can be generated by proteins derived from wheat, soy
and milk. So now I had found the smoking gun. Food proteins can indeed
induce cell-mediated autoimmunity and not surprisingly the foods which
supply the pathogenic proteins are those added to the human diet during the
Neolithic. I believe Dr. Scott's work is of great significane for
understanding the cause of autoimmune disease and strongly supports Eaton's
suggestion the the diet of our ancestors is the best defence against the
diseases of civilization.

The best reference for Scott's work is: Scott, FW, 1996, Food-induced Type
1 Diabetes in the BB Rat. Diabetes/Metabolism Reviews, v.12, p. 341-359.
This paper summarizes all his results up to 1996 and contains references to
all his earlier work.

As a postscript my son has been on a modified Paleolithic Diet for over 2
years now and has never been healthier.