Richard Archer wrote:
> The first people studied were the Swiss mountain folk. They lived mainly
> on whole grain rye bread and cheese, with meat served once per week.
> They seemed to thrive on this very un-paleo diet, and it was not until
> the introduction of modern foods that their health declined.
>
> Other peoples such as Eskimos consume a more traditional paleo diet, also
> with excellent health and a deterioration after the introduction of modern
> foods to their diet.
>
> The theory I'm following at present is that the human body is an amazingly
> effective but fragile filter. When we put a wide variety of wholesome foods
> into it, it filters out the nutrients it needs and expells the rest. The
> fragility comes about from the body's inability to process refined sugar,
> refined flour, chemicals, pesticides, preservatives, additives and a host
> of other modern junk food. I theorise that this "junk food" interferes with
> the body to such an extent that the body can no longer filter the required
> nutrients from the detritus.
I think you might be assuming this without any real justification. An equal,
if not more plausible explanation, is that people all started out as either
allergic or sensitive to some foods. Then, as a partucular culture used
that food, over centuries the members that were more sensitive died out.
So what you have now is some genetic variation amongst people that is greater
than what we had during paleo times. This does not mean that the people
living today are totally adapted to these non-paleo foods. Just their
sensitivity tends to be much less. So your Swiss mountain folk might
be doing fairly well on bread, cheese and meat, but might do even better
without bread and more veggies instead. Sometimes, this natural selection
may be very rapid. If, during the times of famine, all the entire tribe eats
is bread then very quickly all truly sensitive individuals die off. Then,
the tribe can increase the intake of bread because there are fewer obvious
reactions even in the times of plenty. Over a few centuries the impact of
bread could be much smaller than on a totally unadapted person, but to say
that there is non, or that one should not avoid them is a stretch.

Another point I would like to make is believing stories about out of the
way poorly researched cultures. Many of the statements about them are
utterly untrue. As an example, there are plenty of stories about goat
farmers in the Caucus mountains that live very long lifes. They certainly
look the part, and there are plenty of written records going back
many years (prior to the communists coming to power in that region).
Well, somebody apparently did a study on them using a dental age
determination technique (carbon dating I believe, made accurate by
the fact that temperature in the mouth is almost constant). The subjects
turned out to be much younger than claimed. Record falsification in
the old times was also promoted as the means to avoid draft (which
under Tzars was 25 years of service). The old wrinkled look was the
result of overexposure to the Sun at high altitudes. I wish I had
the reference for the study, but I don't.

Ilya.