On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Thomas Seay wrote:

> At the risk of angering some people, I would like to
> ask you the following question.  Dont you think that
> there are limits imposed upon your bodies and after a
> certain point diet changes make no differences?(In
> other words a plateau).  I say this because it seems
> that a lot of people on this list go into minute
> details about diet.  I am wondering if after finding a
> diet that is generally good for you, if it might not
> be a good idea to just stick with that and not spend
> all of your time chasing after the dream of the
> perfect (down to the last detail) diet.

I agree with this principle.  To some extent we are chasing an
illusion.  On the other hand, certain specific details may make
an enormous difference to some people, while those same details
make no difference at all to others.  I have not found, for
example, that it makes any discernible difference to my health or
well-being whether or not I eat a potato.  Others, however,
experience joint pain or other difficulties.  So the process of
finding "a diet that is generally good for you" is highly
experimental.  The rules that we kick around here give us a good
first approximation of what might work, but no more than that.
There seems to be no way to predict which details will matter to
which people.

> One might also wonder what effect, if any, this
> fastidiousness towards diet has on your social life,
> and if that harm might be greater than the benefit of
> "the perfect diet".

I've spoken to this point before.  Stated simply, my position is
that I am unwilling to let dietary fanaticism become an
impediment to social relationships.  But it's not usually a
problem.  For one thing, I have not found that the occasional
dietary lapse harms me at all, and if I enjoy it, so much the
better.  I think I recently described a departmental party I
attended where the hosts went out of their way to make something
that would appeal to me: a lovely stew of duck with chunks of
sausage.  There were also some navy beans in the stew.  I suppose
I could have rejected the entire meal for that reason, but I
chose not to.  Beans don't bother me once in a while.  Foods that
really do bother me (very few, fortunately) are easy enough to
avoid.

> Finally, one might wonder if there is not something a
> bit pathological in it all.  Are people seeking a cure
> from diet for a problem whose true etiology might be
> in a completely different area, be it personal,
> psychological, or social?

Or physiological but not dietary.  But I'd say it's pathological
only if it's destructive.  Are we actually harming ourselves with
this diet?  As a general thing, I think we probably aren't.  In
some cases, we may unwittingly short-change ourselves on certain
nutrients or EFAs, if we are not careful, but that's probably
true of any diet.  We can't count on optimal nutrition as an
*automatic* result of our paleodiet attempts for the simple
reason that we may be doing it wrong with respect to various
nutritional details.  Or the foods that we are getting just
aren't good enough to serve as stand-ins for real paleo foods.
And finally, we don't know that all paleo people were optimally
nourished.  We tend to assume that, but assumptions aren't
knowledge.

In the wild, diets are niche-specific, and animals of a given
species don't thrive equally well in every niche.  Some time ago
we discussed the differences between the deer in Pennsylvania
versus the deer in Texas.  The Texan deer are smaller; the
environment of Texas is simply less hospitable to these animals.
That is, they are less well nourished, even though they are "in
the wild."  So, what do we know about the *comparative* health of
different human HGs populations: the Inuit, the !Kung, the
Australian aborigines, and so on?  Answer: next to nothing.  What
is the HG equivalent of the stunted deer of Texas?  I don't think
we know.

So there's a lot of guesswork.  It's pathological, I suppose,
when our guesses get us into trouble.

Todd Moody
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