- >It seems to me that the Paleo Diet is based on the principle of eating as close >as possible to what was eaten by Hunter-Gatherer thousands of years ago in the >"natural state". IE "naked with a sharp stick". > >Once you start to take into account physiological principles of modern >technological medicine, ie "serum lipids" "vitamins" "essential fatty acids", >then you have shifted to an entirely different principle, namely "how do I make >the body run at its best using all of modern technological knowledge?". I love to read that, but i am not sure if i understand it the way you intended. I loved to hear that ,because for me what make the big difference between paleo eating and neolithique eating, is the relation that thoses peoples had with their food. far from them the idea that food didn't have a spirit , far from them to relate to food independantly from its environment, far from them the idea that food was a lifeless amalgame of nutrients. No matter how well the discriminating knowledge of the science of nutrition, is trying to understand the relationship between peoples and their foods, they will never be able to comprehend the whole. The classic example is that we think we know what is in the sea water , but when we try to reconstitute artificially sea water, by adding all the present minerals . known to be there in the right proportions. we got a product in which fishes can't live. Where we are now with our scientifique knowledge of what food is, is the outcome of the 1st mistake done at the dawn of the neolithique revolution, when we started to discriminate between a weed and a crop. When we started to isolate the food from its original context. Most of the peoples now have lost complete contact with their food .even when they know intellectually ( and some children don't ) that meat come from an animal once living ,they don't KNOW it, they have no experience of it. they don't know what made this animal what it is ,they don't know how this animal fit in the big scheme of things, they don't know the plants that buit his body., they don't know the smell of it,... they just don't know HOW alive they are. they are just barely surviving on a soup of nutrients. we have a long way to go to make this idea of paleo food a reality. jean-claude