On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Todd Moody wrote:

> If we use the criterion that a paleo food is one that our
> ancestors probably *did* eat over the course of many generations,
> then we get different answers.  For example, people of European
> extraction have been eating wheat much longer than they have been
> eating tomatoes.  I can't say about oranges.

I would think that the foods that one digests best are the ones that their
ancestors ate regularly--for the longer period of time, the better.  So, I
guess that I would prefer to eat foods that were widely available to
humans throughout the time periods we are talking about (which are
difficult to determine exactly).  That means, for me, that if a food can
be eaten raw, without processing, but it was not widely available in
practice, that I would not expect that my digestive system would be
optimized to handle it.  To my digestive system, the food would still be
'new'.  This might be splitting hairs though, considering that from time
to time I eat things which were definitely not available very long ago and
am also exposed to many many recently developed chemicals.  Oh well...

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Aaron A. Weiss
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