Then there are those who are raising the next generation of cavemen. S. Boyd Eaton, a paleo pioneer and professor at Emory University, thinks our “ancestral existence” can lend itself to better parenting, showing us how to socialize tots, for instance. Caveman kids played in multi-age groups, he says. “The older children took care of the younger ones. They developed responsibility. There was less competition.” Blogs like High Intensity Mama remind us “hunter-gatherers have nothing like school,” and that children must have time to play. Sharing a family bed is another nascent trend. As my dad, who agrees in theory with co-sleeping, puts it: “A cavebaby sleeping alone was a dead cavebaby.”
When Eaton and Melvin Konnor published their landmark paper on the paleo diet in 1985, their thoughts were far from fasting and exercise. Konnor, an anthropologist and doctor, became interested in diets while studying child development in Botswana in the 1960s. Eaton, a doctor, was interested in improving his health. Their report—which Eaton dubs a “paradigm shift” akin to Copernicus’s discovery that the earth revolves around the sun—gave birth to the paleo diet. But their prescription was more tolerant. It simply focused on approximating the proportion of carbs, protein and fat that our ancestors consumed.
Today, there’s more science showing that the approach they set out is not an entirely batty one. More and more, doctors are entertaining ideas about “diseases of civilization,” as paleo folks term ailments ranging from acne to MS to Alzheimer’s to heart disease. The paleo view is that a lot of the illnesses and conditions we see as “natural” are, in fact, lifestyle-induced. Our environment has changed drastically over the last 10,000 years, stresses Konnor. “The human genome hasn’t been able to evolve fast enough.”
Our best proof of that may lie on the island of Kitava, Papua New Guinea. Kitavans are not the perfect paleo representatives, Staffan Lindeberg, professor of medicine at the University of Lund, concedes. They’re “primitive horticulturalists,” who use sticks to push roots into the ground. Still, they are about as close to hunter-gatherers as we can now get. So Lindeberg has, on three occasions, lived among them. His findings are now paleo folklore. “The Kitavans don’t have Western diseases,” he explains: no heart attack, stroke, obesity, dementia, acne, or diabetes. And it isn’t because they don’t live to old age; many do. It’s their diet. So how do Kitavans die? Some fall from coconut trees or succumb to infection. But many go quickly and quietly. Writes Lindeberg, “The elderly residents of Kitava generally remain quite active up until the end, when they begin to suffer fatigue for a few days and then die.” Lindeberg once met a healthy 78-year-old who, sitting calmly on a rock, warned that his death was imminent; two weeks later, he was dead.
For Gary Rea of Seattle, it’s not necessary to look all the way to Kitava. A few years ago, Rea was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. He says his doctor told him he’d be on insulin for life. Weeks earlier, Rea had picked up a paleo dieting book. Barely a few chapters in, he was convinced “the paleo diet could cure diabetes.” So he ripped up the prescription from his doctor and dove in. Within weeks, he’d dropped 27 lb. “Five months later, the diabetes was gone.” That wouldn’t surprise Dr. Lynda Frassetto. In an ongoing study, the University of California doctor is looking at how diabetics respond to paleo eating. Three quarters of the way through, she already sees “people on the diet get better in a really short amount of time,” even without losing weight.
Of course, not everyone is taken with caveman ways. Katharine Milton, a dietary ecology professor at Berkeley, accepts that, in terms of major evolutionary change, “there hasn’t been zip-a-dee-doo-dah in the last 10,000 years.” But she takes issue with the “hunter-gatherer model.” She notes that while the Tanzanian Hazda eat mostly wild plants, the !Kung of the Kalahari rely on the mongongo nut, and Alaskan Inuit favour meat and fish. Which model, she wonders, is right? Julia Mercader, a University of Calgary archaeologist, likewise argues cavemen were eating cereals tens of thousands of years ago.
Meanwhile, paleo eating continues to evolve. In 1985, Eaton and Konnor allowed foods like skim milk and whole-wheat bread. Konnor still thinks that was the right call, and believes his original concerns about fat were prudent. “You can’t just go to the supermarket and buy meat loaded with fat and say you’re doing the Paleolithic diet. You’re not.” Animals of 10,000 ago, Konnor says, were less fatty—so we must compensate by eating leaner meats, and less. Eaton has gone the other way. He says he had failed to consider the contribution of non-muscle meat like brain and fat depots, and thus underestimated the amount of fat we need. “It makes me feel stupid!”
All this uncertainty gives rise to some convenient variations. Nikoley identifies as “lacto-paleo” (he consumes dairy, insisting that cavemen got some milk when they ate nursing animals). Rea is moving to “vegetarian paleo.” And with the jury still out, my dad is staying on the high-fat bandwagon. But that is not enough to dull fanatical commitment to the cause. “I can guarantee that after I’m long dead, this won’t go away,” proclaims Cordain. “Just like Darwin’s evolution through natural selection is the most powerful idea in modern science and it won’t go away.”
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