Geoffrey Purcell wrote: > I've read Kurt Harris' site and it is pretty misleading, IMO. For > one thing, legalistically speaking, he shouldn't even be using the > word "paleo", since his advice isn't really palaeo at all, just > more of the usual cooked,low-carb dogma a la Atkins. I seem to > recall that his view was that if a person experienced no immediate > allergic reaction to dairy , that they should go for it. He forgot > to mention certain statistics such as that most of the world are > lactose-intolerant to varying degrees; in other words, there are > always going to be some people who may not immediately incur > clearly observable problems from dairy/butter in the short-term, > but who eventually get health-problems years later, as a result of > consuming it. Geoff, this doesn't seem entirely fair. Here are a few points, from browsing his blog: 1. Contrary to your comment above, Harris says to avoid, or even better eliminate both milk and cheese, precisely because of lactose and casein. He specifically does mention lactose intolerance as widespread, and mentions immunologic problems related to casein. 2. He promotes using butter and heavy cream as a good way to get adequate levels of saturated fats, in palatable form, with only slight traces of either lactose or casein, to help people get off of sugar and flour--people not as hardcore as some of us on this list who might just eat raw suet. 3. Rather than being misleading, he admits up front that he is not after "paleo food re-enactment," but is aiming for paleo metabolism. 4. He advocates elimination of all grains, and especially gluten grains, all legumes, HFCS and other refined carbohydrates, vegetable oils (except coconut), and advocates sharp reductions in PUFA, and especially n-6. This all seems adequately paleo to me, as well as his recommendation to get sun or supplement with D3, and to do interval and resistance training. I think most people on this list would have a great majority of views in common with him. Even you, except for the butterfat and cooking. As far as your comment about "cooked, low-carb dogma," I'm quite comfortable including cooked meat and carbohydrate restriction within the spectrum of paleo. Though I am saving for future reference the links you posted a while back about the health effects of dietary AGEs, as well the new links you recently posted. Of course, even if dietary AGEs are damaging to health, as they appear to be, that doesn't mean they're not paleo. Just because something is bad for you doesn't mean it's not paleo. Running around with spears, hunting big animals, for example. That can get you killed! Maybe we never fully adapted towards neutralizing the effects AGEs and HCAs in cooked meat because they're not so deadly that, in the context of an otherwise healthy diet, they stop us from passing on our genes or contributing to group survival. Hilary