On Wednesday, June 30, 2004, at 11:27 PM, Todd Moody wrote:

> Are
> these rules, and the principles on which they rest, internally
> consistent?  They are not.  And that, frankly, bothers me.  On the
> other
> hand, I'm satisfied that for many people, 99% of the health benefits of
> "paleo" are attainable by 2 measures: (1) reduction of carbohydrate
> intake; (b) eating whole foods as much as possible, whether or not
> those
> foods satisfy some or all of the above rules.
>

I would say measure number three, avoiding grain, especially wheat.
That one point is the big one for me.

I think you may be over intellectualizing as 'rules' what are more like
guidelines. These rules come about in part from theory, eat what was
available to our ancestors, sharp stick etc, and in part from personal
experience, so of course they are not consistent. In fact we can never
eat what our ancestors ate, since we have no idea where they lived and
what they ate for more than a few generations back. Besides, many of
the foods they ate are probably extinct now.

The rules are not absolute anyway. Don't eat grain, legumes, tubers.
Well I at least am convinced that paleo people did at times eat all of
these things, whether because they were starving or because they just
liked to experiment with new things.

Given the imperfection of our knowledge, things just can't be
consistent all of the time. Don't sweat it.