On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Jim Swayze wrote:

> Todd > That's rubbish.  I never claimed there's no need to discuss the
> issue.  I didn't announce my position as "undeniable truth," but presented
> arguments.
>
> Really?  I thought you claimed any position contrary was "intellectual
> dishonesty."  I am sorry if I've confused you with someone else.  I do get
> this list in digest, so sometimes it's hard to follow the conversation.

I wrote, on Sept. 12, "In the end, we have to make guesses based
on what paleolithic people plausibly *could* have eaten
regularly, which is the basis of the "sharp stick" rule.  Given
that limitation, I don't see any honest way to deny that
rennet-fermented cheese could have been eaten regularly.  It was
there, in the stomachs of young mammals."

In your reply, you chose to quote the second sentence of that.
The proposition at issue is: "Rennet-fermented cheese could have
been eaten regularly."  That is part of my argument, not my
entire position.  To say that I've claimed that any position
contrary to my own is "intellectual dishonesty" -- a term I
haven't even used -- is just false.  It may, in fact, be
intellectually dishonest.

> Todd > if a food source was continuously available to paleo man then we
> should assume he took advantage of it
>
> I think you've got a little too much of Hobbes' "nasty, brutish, and short"
> in your thinking.  Except in times of shortage, which I believe were
> relatively rare given man's broad range of food sources and ingenuity in
> finding them, why wouldn't he have discarded anything he considered below
> the standard of edibility?  Paleo man was surely able to tell that certain
> foods were good, some not so good, some really bad, some kind of bad.  He
> was certainly able to make those distinctions; there are many, many
> borderline foods that are considered starvation fare.  But you're right, I
> haven't a clue what that edibility standard might be.

That's right.  You have offered no reason at all to classify
stomach contents as below or even near the borderline of
edibility, and no reason to consider them options only for times
of shortage.

> And neither of us
> know to what degree cottage cheese causes people problems.

Exactly.  This fact removes that consideration from having any
evidential weight at all.  There is no reason, in the absence of
evidence, to assume that it causes problems for many people.

> I think the
> answer to that would probably point to whether suckling stomach contents
> were eaten regularly enough for long enough for adaptation.  Personally, I
> don't like cottage cheese enough to eat it now and hope for a positive
> answer.

I don't like it either, but I recognize that my preferences, and
yours, have nothing to do with what paleolithic people might have
eaten.  I don't care for liver either, nor do I like brains (I've
tried them), and I'm not that crazy about seafood.  I wouldn't
consider that any of these preferences of mine have value as
evidence of what paleolithic people ate or preferred to eat.

> A word on standards.  You've said my standard is too high and listed some
> modern foods that paleo man surely did not eat, yet which are commonly
> accepted as paleo (olive oil might be a good example.)  I believe this was
> meant to be evidence that, by my standard, if we're not eating mastadon
> we're not paleo.

Once again, you have misrepresented what I said.  I said that
there are plenty of foods that we accept as paleo for which we
have no direct physical evidence at all of consumption by paleo
man, such as turkey livers.  I'm not arguing that turkey livers
are not paleo, only that if you restrict paleo foods to those for
which we have direct physical evidence of long-term regular
paleolithic consumption, the list of paleo foods will be rather
short.

> I don't think my standard is quite that high.  A modern
> paleodiet should begin by excluding first those classes of foods that
> paleolithic man certainly did not regularly consume.  Dairy is one of
> those, perhaps with a cottage cheese exception.

Well, there you are.  I agree with that position.  Most forms of
dairy food would indeed not have been available to paleolithic
man, but curd cheese and its derivatives are a plausible
exception, precisely because they *were* available to hunters.

> Todd > Rennet-fermented cheese would have been available to paleolithic
> people to an extent that simple whole milk would not have been.
>
> Why is this so?  Wouldn't lactating females been considered fair game?
> Like the stomach contents of sucklings, wouldn't the mammary gland have
> been milked and the contents consumed?  Wouldn't this have been just as
> common?

Maybe, but in wild animals not bred for dairy farms, enormous
milk-filled udders are not typical.  A modern dairy cow is bred
to produce more milk than a calf would actually consume.  And
calves are easier prey than adult animals.  But I wouldn't argue
that whole milk was never available in this form, only (as I
stated) that it would have been less available.

> The evidence is clear that dairy causes problems.  I wouldn't be surprised
> if that, to a greater or lesser degree, applies to all milk-based products.

The evidence is anything but clear that dairy in all forms causes
problems.  The Seely study has: "Direct, linear and reasonably
accurate correlation has been found between coronary heart
disease (CHD) mortality rates and the consumption of unfermented
milk proteins--namely the protein content of all dairy products
with the only important exception of cheese--in a study of male
mortality rates and food consumption statistics of 24 countries."
The "important exception of cheese" is rather striking.  In my
previous post, I mentioned tyramine headaches, another common
dairy problem, but only associated with *aged* cheeses.  Another
issue is osteoporosis, which is believed to be aggravated by
foods with high PRAL value.  While hard cheeses have very high
PRAL values, soft cheeses such as curd cheese have the same value
as meats.

In addition, we seem to have a body of evidence from Weston Price
and his disciples, that milk products fermented in traditional
ways (which would include simple rennet-fermentation) is a
healthy food, and that the problems are the result of departures
from those methods.  I'm not arguing for wholesale inclusion of
dairy foods, even those prepared by various traditional methods,
in paleodiets; only that there is some overlap here.  In the
simple form in which it would have been available to paleolithic
hunters, cheese is a paleo food.  Sometimes changing the form of
a food changes its nature, and so when we go from curd cheeses to
aged cheeses and other derivatives, we move farther away from
paleo, and increase the risk accordingly.  I think we see a
similar pattern with other foods, too.

Todd Moody
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