On Nov 08, 2004, at 3:10 pm, Jim Swayze wrote:
> I found Eva's comments on oats and fish interesting.  My experiment
> this weekend was with oats.  I ate a granola made with ingredients
> that are paleo by anyone's standards -- except of course for the oats.
>  The results?  Gassiness, bloating, intense diarrhea and severe
> thirst.  I'd still place oats in the second category -- wheat would
> cause me the same symptoms as the oats but with added joint pain,
> canker sores in my mouth, itchy eyes, and more bloating.  But it's
> clear that they're bad for me.  I suspect I'm not alone.

Can I make a suggestion that an approximation of "paleo" is that it is
the inversely proportional to the percentage of of people who
experience negative side-effects from it.

The last thing I want is to reduce "paleo" to a number- or we will be
back to counting calories/fat/carbs etc, but I see something like this:
feed 100 people a diet of nothing but cornflakes with milk, beans on
toast, cheese and tomato sandwiches, chicken and chips, and green salad
with cabbage and chopped walnuts.  I imagine that in 30 years time you
will have something along the lines of: 50 people have a disease
attributed to the corn and wheat, 25 to the milk and cheese, 15 to the
beans, 10 to the chips (ie potatoes), 5 to the walnuts, 3 to the
tomatoes, 2 to the cabbage, 1 to the lettuce and none to the chicken.
You can't say that half the people must be adapted to grains because
they weren't affected by them, nor can you say that tomato is paleo
because only 3 people were affected by it.  Walnuts, cabbage, lettuce
are arguably much more paleo than tomatoes (if you are an old-world
eater) but all of them cause some health problems in a limited section
of the population.  I think, though, that it is easier to tell if these
more paleo foods agree with you (you either like them or you don't- or
they make you feel sick) than it is with grains and dairy.

I want to re-iterate that I don't believe this is how we should
*define* paleo (either logically or statistically), but that it's a
good common sense rule when confronted by an iffy food (peppers,
macadamias, etc).  The other rule of thumb I use is "is the food
related to a clearly paleo food"?  (Eg pecans are related to walnuts,
so I'm happy eating pecans as they don't seem to make me ill.)  Overall
I've got a non-paranoid way of deciding what to eat that I'm 99% sure
won't cause me trouble.  Getting the other 1% right would probably lead
to ill-health through stress.

Ashley