Eliot Martin Glick wrote:

> 2. Ray Audette does not directly address the issue of protein maximums.
> There is a short paragraph, if I recall, where it is mentioned, but he
> does not give it the clear and convincing treatment that Rosedale does.


Ray does caution, I believe, against trying to do a low-fat variant of
the Paleo Diet, but he doesn't argue for a protein ceiling or anything
like that.

You know, it's probably a good idea to make a distinction between two
approaches to paleodiet.  One could be called the "paleomimetic"
approach, which actually tries to figure out what foods our paleolithic
ancestors ate, and roughly what quantities they ate them in, and then
imitates that diet.  Ray Audette's approach is paleomimetic in general,
although he is casual about allowing New World foods that certainly were
not part of the actual paleolithic diet.  I think Loren Cordain would
fall into this category as well although he, like Audette, allows some
foods that would be, and have been disputed.

The other approach might be called "paleo-inspired."  I think this is
the approach taken by Ron Rosedale and Barry Sears.  The paleo-inspired
kind of diet takes the actual paleolithic diet, as we believe it was, as
a kind of baseline, and then emphasizes certain aspects of it for
certain purposes.  Sears, for example, allows the use of low-fat cheeses
to make up "blocks" in his diet, but he does not argue that paleo people
were eating low-fat mozzarella sticks.  Rather, Sears believes that the
Zone diet captures what is important about the paleolithic diet (in his
view), but he also uses contemporary science to fine-tune and optimize
it.  Ron Rosedale's approach is similar.  He doesn't attempt to *copy*
the paleolithic diet exactly, but his plan emphasizes what he thinks is
important about it, and uses contemporary science to optimize it, but in
a manner different from Sears.

Rosedale doesn't claim that paleolithic people followed a protein
limitation scheme, just as Sears doesn't claim that they calculated
"blocks."  Sears is a believer in CR, and also believes that his Zone
diet is a plan that makes people more like to be successful with CR.
Rosedale also believes in CR but also believes that what makes CR work
is the insulin control it yields, and the conversion of metabolism to
primarily fat-burning.  I think he would take the view that some
paleomimetic approaches might succeed better than others in this, and
some non-paleo approaches might succeed as well as any paleomimetic
approaches too.

Todd Moody
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