On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Jim Swayze wrote:

> Let me say this as well, Todd.  You seem to suggest a standard whereby we
> eat whatever we want as long as it's not *proven* "non-paleo."  A sort of
> dietary "innocent until proven guilty."  Is that, too, a misreading of your
> message?

It depends on how you take "proven guilty."  In my opinion, if it
can be shown by plausible reasoning that a food was simply not
available to paleolithic people, then that's good enough reason
to consider it nonpaleo (regardless of whether one might choose
to eat it anyway, on a "close enough" basis).  I'd put tomatoes
in this category.  They are New World foods that simply weren't
where the paleolithic people were, until they came to the New
World.  When that was is a matter of dispute, but the "received"
view is about 15,000 years ago, i.e., not long before the
beginnings of agriculture in the Old World.  I don't have any
information that tomatoes are harmful, except for those people
who have problems with nightshades, and they are a source of
lycopene.  But I wouldn't consider them paleo.

So, in my view, the first question to ask of a food is, Was it
available for some or much of the paleolithic era?  Was it there
to be eaten.  If the answer is yes, as I think it is for fresh
curd cheese, then the next question is whether people would eat
it or avoid it for some reason.  Some foods that were available
might nevertheless be avoided or neglected for various reasons,
such as poor return on effort needed to get that food.  Setting
aside my (and your) personal disgust about eating stomach
contents, I can't find any reason why paleo people would have
avoided it.  And the fact that some hunters are known to consume
stomach contents strengthens the case.  It's not as if we have to
imagine a practice that has never been observed.  Furthermore, we
have ample reason to believe that paleolithic hunters prized
sources of fat, since fat increases the utilizability of lean
protein -- hence the effort to harvest marrow.  But cheese is
also a good source of fat, even in curd form.  I can't think of
any good reason why they would neglect it.

So it's not just "innocent until proven guilty," because there
seem to be converging lines of reasoning that point in the same
direction.  The fact that some of the known problems associated
with dairy intake are not associated with cheese, or at least not
with fresh soft cheese, is a further convergence.  I'm arguing
that it's not a coincidence.

The reasoning isn't so far-fetched.  We don't dispute the paleo
status of chicken livers, but what evidence is there that
paleolithic people ate them?  Are there fossilized remains of
chicken livers, or coprolites?  I never heard of any, but I don't
think we require that because chicken (or turkey, or duck, or...)
livers were *there* and they had nutritional value, and there's
no reason to suppose they weren't eaten (despite the fact that I
don't like them).  And that's good enough, despite the fact that
some people can't eat them, without getting headaches.  The same
reasoning works, or should work, for fresh soft cheese.

In his 24-country study of dairy and CHD, Seely seems not to have
considered the more obvious inference that dairy *sugar* is what
marks the main difference between milk and cheese.  He comments
on "unfermented milk proteins" being exempt from the correlation
without noticing that it is sugar content of milk that is the
most dramatically affected by fermentation.

I don't like cottage cheese much, myself, and I'm not looking for
excuses to eat it.  Farmer cheese is bland, but okay.  I enjoy
fresh goat cheese, crumbled over veggies or on a salad, but I
don't need the Paleo Seal of Approval to give myself permission
to eat it.  I simply think the blanket prohibition of all dairy
foods is unwarranted, an example of what logicians call the
Fallacy of Accent: the inappropriate application of a general
principle (paleo people didn't drink milk) to an exceptional case
(cheese in the stomachs of killed animals).

Todd Moody
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