It drives me paleonuts when I hear this too. It has been mentioned
before on this list that Genesis 5:3-32 lists a number of people who
lived well beyond 100 years and the oldest of them all is found in
Genesis 5:27: So all the days of Me·thu´se·lah amounted to nine hundred
and sixty-nine years and he died.

>
> Many dispelled the Bible's facts as myth at the time but if we accept
> the Bible as fact, we will not be easily lied to by the 'system of
> things'.
> Also discussed before was the fact that when Adam and Eve were thrown
> out of the Garden, they were forced to eat bread for the rest of time
> and get sick and die. This corresponds with the introduction of the
> cultivation of grains (website below) and thus the introduction of
> disease and death.
>
> (Genesis 3:17-19) 17 And to Adam he said: “Because you listened to
> your wife’s voice and took to eating from the tree concerning which I
> gave you this command, ‘You must not eat from it,’ cursed is the
> ground on your account. In pain you will eat its produce all the days
> of your life. 18 And thorns and thistles it will grow for you, and you
> must eat the vegetation of the field. 19 In the sweat of your face you
> will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were
> taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.”
>
>> The problem was that the
>> paleoanthropologists had assumed that elderly people would have
>> deteriorated bones, as modern humans do, but this assumption was
>> unwarranted. I wish I could find the reference...
>
>
> There was an article that mentioned that grain producing areas such as
> Egypt had large populations of people with osteoporosis and brain
> diseases as shown by their mummified remains and remains of those in
> areas that did not grow grains, like some Andean countries, had no
> degeneration.
> Here is a good article but not the one I was looking for:
> http://www.celiac.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/st_prod.html?p_prodid=78
>
> Paleobest,
> Susan
>
I found the above reference to Genesis in Susan's posting to be quite
interesting in light of our paleo philosophy. A good friend of mine --
who's work over several decades as a colonic therapist has put her in
contact with an increasing number of people with "gluten intolerance" --
speculates that the real culprit behind this phenomenon is grain
hybridisation. This is known as traditional cross-breeding (as opposed
to genetic modification) and has been used in agriculture for centuries;
however, since around the 50s, the technology has become much more
sophisticated, occurs at a frenzied pace, and this has caused gluten
levels in common grains to skyrocket by multiple factors. I don't have
any references or links to back this up though some may exist. It's only
speculation as far as I am aware.

Paleobest!
Eliot