I watched the vid, and the wrap up at the end, as you give in the “cliff note version” above, is what I thought “Paleo” was all along. I recently “went Paleo” in the last six weeks, after having read Cordains book, but that was after some soul searching for awhile.
Maybe I’m wrong, but the message that I got from his book was the same as the cliff notes wrap up, as well as what you wrote in the quotation marks, minus the beans and legumes. I interpreted The Paleo Diet as an attempt to eat as closely and as similarly we could in this modern world, i.e choosing wisely those whole foods found in supermarkets that in their modern forms come CLOSER to replicating what our paleo ancestors would have eaten. Clearly these people didn’t have domesticated cattle, and mostly ate wild game when they could, but in my modern interpretation I’m going to eat a nicely cooked medium rare steak, and it is NOT going to be with wild carrots, but with their modern counterparts.
I don’t really want to come across as a defender of the diet. I lived through my mothers and step fathers Atkins phase where they couldn’t differentiate between the carbs found in vegetables vs. a slice of Wonderbread. I wouldn’t want to put anyone through that dogma.
For myself who has struggled with weight my whole life the diet makes sense to me, largely through an evolutionary lens in that human beings ate “primally” for a far longer time than through agriculture, and perhaps our bodies haven’t caught up and adapted to the circumstance, that those of us living in the modern world are rarely ever too far away from a source of food, unfortunately most of the latter being processed. I combined this with reading from another diet called The Body Code by Jay Cooper, which really has more to do with body typology, i.e. somatotyping, but also gets “new agy” with Indian Ayurvedic Energy typing. I think that there is value to the latter, but I could see how people would be turned off by the new age interpretations. Still even from that book I took away that this was a method in that we all don’t have the same body structure, so the same dietary guidelines won’t work for all of us, but it was not an end all be all answer to solve all your dietary ills.
Now some of you may have had the “privilege” of dealing with Paleo disciples. I don’t think I’m one of them, whatever they may be. Like I said earlier, I thought Cordains book was more of a modern spin on an attempt to eat as closely as we can to our paleo relatives, but clearly with a modern spin, as I stated previously.
I hope this response doesn’t count as a level 4 butt hurt emergency.
Best,
Dave
) but at least the Paleo “life style” has generally OK info, but it’s also based on false premise, which gets problematic fast. Basic premise: