On Mon, 15 Nov 1999, Erik Hill wrote:

> What are some of the bigger antioxidants?

Vitamine C, vitamin E.  These are water soluble and fat soluble,
respectively.  Many herbs and spices, such as turmeric, are also
powerful antioxicants.

> Now this begs the question, what
> is the ideal diet within the paleo range?  I suppose, a high variety, meat
> based diet which nevertheless includes many fruits and vegetables, nuts, and
> seeds, and perhaps the occasional insect?  I don't suppose there is a
> reasonable, scientific way to at least guess what this diet might look like?

There is probably no single answer to your question, but the
general guidelines that you have given sound about right.

> This brings up some worries on my part.  It really took a huge sample (all
> of humanity, over all of human history) to make the whole grain/milk/bean
> problem apparent, and even then, it's apparent only to a small minority of
> humans!  How do we know, for example, that eating a bunch of oranges isn't
> going to create some subtle problem 30 years down the line?

We don't know.  It's a calculated risk.  But the paleo concept
gambles that the risks are lower for foods that have been part of
the human food supply for a longer time.  That's reasonable, but
not infallible.  For one thing, we have only a sketchy idea of
which foods those are.  Moreover, long-term consumption of a food
doesn't guarantee that it's effects will be uniformly good for
everyone.

> In other words,
> what tools do we have at our disposal that would allow us to predict the
> effect of long-range dietary changes on the human animal, as opposed to
> simply discover, through an analysis of our health through our history,
> problems associated with changes that have occurred thousands of years ago?

The main tools are clinical, laboratory, and epidemiological
studies.  These do not give us direct information about long-term
effects, of course, but they put us in a position to make
cautious inferences.  Even the historical approach is highly
fallible, because we cannot readily separate the dietary factors
from the non-dietary factors.  The problems of epidemiological
research are familiar, and historical epidemiology is harder, not
easier.

> Furthermore, how do I know that eliminating, say, cheese, is going to
> improve the probability of my having good health over the course of my life?

You don't know for sure, but the basic idea is that there is
evidence linking dairy consumption with various health problems.
That approach, of course, lumps all dairy foods into a single
category, which may not be a good idea.  Still, it provides at
least some initial tipping of the probabilities.

>   We can make a reasonable guess that the total change from paleo to neo is
> very problematic, and that the more recent change from neo to industrial is
> probably worse, but can we nail down specific culprits?  Affix blame?
> Perhaps some of these foods are innocent!  Any ideas?

Same as above.  And the total change from paleo to neo included a
lot more than dietary change.  But the best we can do is to tip
the probabilities somewhat.  My own opinion is that the main
effect of the Neolithic dietary changes was to (a) decrease
protein consumption, (b) increase carb consumption, (b) imbalance
omega fat consumption, and that these changes alone are adequate
to explain most of the health issues.  That is, I have the idea
that the problem was not so much what they started eating but
what they stopped eating.  In modern times the situation is made
worse by the addition of processing, hydrogenated fats, and so
on.

Todd Moody
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