Paul Jaminet at PHD has some thoughts to offer:
Yet, in the Paleolithic, the ancestral diet was probably similar in general outline for at least 2 million years: it consisted largely of meat, marrow, and plant foods collected from open woodlands and tree-spotted grasslands. There was sufficient time for new mutations to appear and rise to fixation, and then new mutations to appear and reach fixation against this new genetic background, and so on for many cycles. It is certainly possible that humanity became adapted to this (slowly changing) Paleolithic diet, and that the genetic variety introduced in the Holocene has been insufficient to destroy our fitness for a diet like that of the Paleolithic, and insufficient to make us well adapted to new Neolithic diets.Tuck at Yelling Stop:
This point – that the relevant time-scale for assessing adaptedness may be the time for the genome to reach equilibrium, not merely the time for new point mutations to appear and grow to regional prominence – is an elementary one in evolutionary biology, one that is made in our book on pages 4-6, but from the Chronicle excerpt and various reviews (including this Amazon reader review), it appears that Zuk does not acknowledge this reason why treating the Paleolithic as an environment of evolutionary adaptedness may be a “Paleoinsight,” not a “Paleofantasy.”
She shows 4 books on one of her first slides, two of them are The Paleo Diet and The Primal Blueprint. She's not read either of them.Melissa from Hunt.Gather.Love takes on the atherosclerosis claims:
Her first "rebuttal" of the paleo diet is to point out that we can't get by on meat alone since we need to eat vegetables for vitamin C.
1. Neither of those books advocates eating only meat. Both encourage you to eat organ meats and lots of vegetables.
2. She's wrong on the facts. You do not, in fact, need to eat vegetables to get vitamin C. You can, in fact, get all you need on a diet of 100% meat. This was demonstrated almost 100 years ago in a famed experiment where Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson ate meat under medical supervision for a year …
She proceeds to attack a bunch of other claims that the paleo diet doesn't make, or she gets her facts wrong.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus
I've written about mummy abuse before, but today the press is having a field day with the preliminary findings of the Horus study, an examination of atherosclerosis in ancient mummies. Luckily, you don't have to listen to them, because the study is available online for anyone to read. …These straw-men arguments you see from the medical mainstream ("Paleo is a stupid and unhealthy meat-only fad-diet.") are so tiresome that I lack the energy to engage in them. I state my opinion (for what it's worth) and then leave those clowns alone, so they can reaffirm themselves by attacking straw-men in their Confirmation Bias El Dorado.
But let's not forget that the atherosclerosis levels are still lower than modern levels. …
And that atherosclerosis is a complex condition that does not always lead to disease.
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