-
>It seems to me that the Paleo Diet is based on the principle of eating as
close
>as possible to what was eaten by Hunter-Gatherer thousands of years ago in
the
>"natural state".    IE "naked with a sharp stick".
>
>Once you start to take into account physiological principles of modern
>technological medicine, ie "serum lipids" "vitamins" "essential fatty
acids",
>then you have shifted to an entirely different principle, namely "how do I
make
>the body run at its best using all of modern technological knowledge?".

I love to read that, but i am not sure if i understand it the way you
intended.
I loved to hear that ,because for me what make the big difference between
paleo eating and neolithique eating, is the relation that thoses peoples had
with their food. far from them the idea that food didn't have a spirit , far
from them to relate to food independantly from its environment, far from
them the idea that food was a lifeless amalgame of nutrients. No matter how
well the discriminating knowledge of the science of nutrition, is trying to
understand the relationship between peoples and their foods, they will never
be able to comprehend the whole. The classic example is that we think we
know what is in the sea water , but when we try to reconstitute artificially
sea water,  by adding all the present minerals . known to be there in the
right proportions. we got a product in which fishes can't live.

Where we are now with our scientifique knowledge of what food is, is the
outcome of the 1st mistake done at the dawn of the neolithique revolution,
when we started to  discriminate  between a weed and a crop.
When we started to isolate the food from its original context. Most of the
peoples now  have lost complete contact with  their food .even when they
know intellectually  ( and some children don't ) that meat come from an
animal  once living ,they don't KNOW it, they have no experience of it. they
don't know what made this animal what it is ,they don't know how this animal
fit in the big scheme of things, they don't  know the plants that buit his
body., they don't know the smell of it,... they just  don't know HOW alive
they are. they are just barely surviving on  a soup of nutrients.
we have a long way to go to make this idea of paleo food a reality.
jean-claude