On Sunday, November 7, 2004, at 09:35 PM, Eva Hedin wrote:

> I'd really like you to expound on that. I thought that the essence of
> the
> idea of eating paleo was that paleo is healthy and if it isn't paleo it
> isn't healthy. Am I wrong?
> Eva
>
>

I am not so sure. The hard part is determining what is paleo. My
ancient ancestors never ate citrus fruits, for example, unless by
chance some long ago ancestor was from east Asia and somehow made it
over to England thousands of years ago. So am I adapted to citrus? It
is a fruit, and not poisonous, but no ancestor of mine ate it until
maybe a few hundred years ago at best.

Same with tea, chocolate, most spices and quite a number of 'healthy'
vegetables. Science tells us these all have certain health benefits,
and statistical analysis suggests that people who eat them all live a
bit longer than people who don't, on average. But no ancestor of mine
ever ate them before the modern era. So no pre-adaptation.

We set up categories of foods, acceptable and unacceptable. Grains bad,
fruits good. Beans bad, fish/meat good. But any sensible person
realizes that these categories are not absolute. Some fish are
poisonous, for example. In general we try to avoid man-made foods like
trans-fatty acids. But milk has plenty of trans-fats, and meat has a
little too. So they must have some purpose in the body. It is a
question of quantity, not quality. I don't slather margarine over my
toast every morning, but I don't obsess about the occasional bite of it
either.

Science can create chemicals that are good for us. Some health food
fanatics eat the preservative BHA, for example. Maybe it does them some
good?

I don't think the answer is cut and dried. The paleo rules are a good
guideline. Paleo foods make up the great mass of the food I eat because
it seems sensible to me to eat this way. But paleo is not the only
guideline I use.