Thanks Ashley, for the tips re: bulking up via weightlifting, which I agree
with you on.

<<Re: Cordain bashing and rabbit starvation>>

Ashley wrote:
> Personally, I think Cordain should be locked up for promoting people eat
lean meat.  It is the single biggest 
> mistake ever made in a paleo book!  God only knows how many people have
experienced rabbit starvation trying 
> to follow his recommendations and came to the conclusion paleo is wrong.

Putting aside for a moment whether Cordain promoted eating only lean meat
and not fats OR carbs so as to avoid rabbit starvation, I think it would be
wise to try to keep in mind that Cordain is the founder of the Institute of
Paleolithic Research and is still actively doing research and writing in the
field, whereas Ray Audette, while having made a valuable contribution, has
become inactive, so that Cordain is doing much more right now to promote
Paleolithic nutrition and the future of the field rests largely on his
shoulders, and those of his global coalition of scientists. 

Dean Esmay, one of the original co-listowners of PALEODIET and PALEOFOOD,
wrote: "My friend Dr. Loren Cordain of Colorado State University, who is one
of the pre-eminent researchers in the burgeoning field of human nutrition,
was a big part of what made the [PALEODIET] group successful." Ray Audette
himself called Dr. Cordain "a pioneer and leading authority in the field of
Paleolithic nutrition." So Cordain's positive contribution far outweighs any
errors he has made. 

If you believe that Cordain made a mistake which caused people to experience
rabbit starvation, put forth your evidence and let's analyze it. I don't
think he did. On the other hand I do think that Dr. Cordain didn't provide
sufficient evidence to conclude that saturated fats from wild meats are
unhealthy. However, it is a debatable point and it is true that wild animals
contain less overall saturated fats than equivalent-sized domesticated
animals, which does raise interesting questions. Part of the problem is that
there has been very little research comparing the effects of consuming wild
meats and organs vs. domesticated, so it's difficult to make any conclusion
one way or another. Even on saturated fats from domesticated animals there
are studies with contradictory results and the picture is not clear. Cordain
partly made up for the rhetorical overemphasis on lean commercial meats by
advocating in The Paleo Diet and elsewhere for the omega-3 and
monounsaturated fats found in foods like wild fish and wild animal brains
and marrow that have been well-established as being healthy (going by some
of his critics one might wrongly assume that he is against all fats) and by
saying in later interviews that there are neutral and good saturated fats as
well as bad ones. 

Ray Audette, whose book was the first book on Paleo nutrition that I read
and to whom I am eternally grateful, also made errors in NeanderThin, most
of which Todd Moody has pointed out in the past. For example, these are from
the 1999 edition:

-> p. 45: Ray stated his speculation that Cro Magnons evolved from
Neanderthals via the process of neoteny without evidence and as though it
were a fact. DNA evidence and the majority of scientific opinion do not at
the moment support this (as illustrated here
http://www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/pictures/essay_pics/evol_tree4.jpg and here
http://neurophilosophy.files.wordpress.com/2006/08/htree.jpg). Some
Neanderthal genes probably passed on into later-surviving hominid species,
but the Neanderthal genes would not likely account for the majority of the
genes of the surviving species.

-> p. 71: Ray wrote that cashews are forbidden on his diet because they
"must be heated" to be eaten safely, perhaps unaware of the fact that
cashews can be heated naturally by the sun, which is how most commercial
cashews reportedly are heated (see http://www.nutsonline.com/nuts/cashews).
Since sunlight is a technology available to anyone who is "naked with a
sharp stick," cashews qualify as a NeanderThin food under Ray's definition.
He also wrote that cashews are "inedible raw," which came as news to me and
many other people who have eaten raw cashews. Todd Moody also pointed out
that his father ate raw peanuts for many years, despite Ray's claim that
they are also "inedible."

-> Ray says to eat only foods that would have been available to
pre-agricultural humans with nothing but a sharp stick, yet in his recipes
he often calls for the use of olive oil, and recommends flaxseed and fish
oil supplements, which all take more than just a sharp stick to process.
Some people on this list apparently consider any flaxseed oil to be a big
no-no and some studies have found harmful effects from olive oil.

And there were other errors. Should we discard anything Ray wrote based on
these errors? Of course not. They pale in comparison to the service he did
for people like me by recognizing very early on what many top scientists did
not see--that all animals, including humans, should eat the foods that
millions of years of evolution (or divine creation) made them best adapted
to eat. The most important point in both Cordain's and Audette's books is
the recognition of the key factors in human nutrition and health--the
Paleolithic theory of nutrition and biological discordance, the disease
mechanism that underpins evolutionary medicine. All else is secondary.