Is Paleo Even Possible?

Recently there's been some criticism of the "paleo" diet, but it's not so much the diet that is criticized but the name. People apparently want to condemn the whole idea of eating real food because of the name-- paleo, primal, ancestral, caveman -- saying that we can't possibly know what people 10,000+ years ago ate;  are they implying, therefore, that we should eat junk? Are they serious?

I have no doubt that few of us would want to live and eat like ancient people. And even if we wanted to, we simply couldn't.

The leaders of the primal/paleo lifestyle admit that we can't live like ancient people, but they chose the name for lack of something better: "The Organic Meat and Vegetables with Some Fruit but No Sugar or Grain Diet and Moderate Exercise Outdoor Lifestyle" is just too long to handle. It needs a catchy name, it needs to indicate the type of diet, but it doesn't mean we want to live in a cave, never take a bath, and never buy food at the grocery store.

In his blog post Is Paleo Even Paleo and Does it Even Matter, Chris Kresser makes these points:

• It is very difficult for us to know with any certainty what paleo people ate or how they lived.
• The vast majority of studies of modern hunter-gatherers (HGs) have been ethnographic in nature, and as such are heavily influenced by the researchers own assumptions and objectives.
• Modern HGs are not analogous to paleolithic HGs. Even limited amounts of contact with modern people can have a profound impact on the diet and lifestyle of HG populations. This means we can’t simply study modern HG groups and assume that their habits reflect our distant ancestors.
• Some have noted that the people they study will often change their dietary habits while being studied, perhaps to impress the researchers.
• Modern HGs aren’t living in their traditional habitats. They’ve been displaced from their more optimal habitats by agriculturists and pastoralists. This means the diet they’re currently eating is probably atypical. ...

[But we do know ] for example, that modern diseases like diabetes, obesity, cancer, autoimmunity and heart disease were rare (or even nonexistent) in paleo people and are still rare in the few HG groups around the world that have been lucky enough to preserve their traditional diet and lifestyle.

We also know that when modern foods like wheat flour, industrial seed oils and sugar are introduced in these populations, the incidence of modern diseases goes up commensurately. And, even more telling, when these groups return to their traditional ways, the modern diseases disappear again. This suggests that it wasn’t some genetic vulnerability that caused them to develop modern diseases with the introduction of modern foods.

So yes, paleo may not actually be paleo. We will probably never know exactly what our paleo relatives ate. ...[But] we know enough about ancestral diets in a general sense to suggest that they are superior to modern diets for human health. And we know enough – thanks to current clinical research – about modern foods like flour, seed oils and sugar to know that we shouldn’t be eating them.

My used copy looks like this;
the version in print now
has a different cover.

With all the talk about not knowing how primal man lived, The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas sounded interesting when I came across it on Amazon.  She was 19 when she, with her mother (an anthropologist), dad, and brother, spent several years living among the Kalahari  Bushmen in the early 1950s.  

Of course, hunter/gathers in south Africa would have lived quite differently from HGs in other areas of the world. However, just reading about this one small clan of Bushmen in the 1950s before they were removed from their traditional land gives us a tiny insight into this difficult way of life. Over the next few days, I plan to write about her descriptions of "Hunting" and "Gathering."   She and her brother went with the men on a hunt, and she went with the women as they gathered plants and roots; they had to contend with lions, leopards, and hyenas; they moved in search of water.  It's fascinating to read about -- but I am glad I don't have to live like that.