September 13th, 2007 by Jemaleddin Cole

In his intro­duc­tion to The Pale­olithic Diet, Dr. Ben Balzer writes:

There are races of people who are all slim, who are stronger and faster than us. They all have straight teeth and per­fect eye­sight. Arthri­tis, dia­betes, hyper­ten­sion, heart dis­ease, stroke, depres­sion, schiz­o­phre­nia and cancer are absolute rar­i­ties for them. These people are the last 84 tribes of hunter-​gatherers in the world. They share a secret that is over 2 mil­lion years old. Their secret is their diet- a diet that has changed little from that of the first humans 2 mil­lion years ago, and their pre­de­ces­sors up to 7 mil­lion years ago. Theirs is the diet that man evolved on, the diet that is coded for in our genes. It has some major dif­fer­ences to the diet of “civilization”. You are in for a few big surprises.

I’m sure you’re not sur­prised to find out that he’s not an anthro­pol­o­gist. He’s a “family physician.”

What really sur­prises me is that appar­ently Dr. Balzer has gone to a lot of trou­ble to create this diet with­out ever having seen a hunter-​gatherer. I mean, doesn’t he get the Dis­cov­ery chan­nel? And why wouldn’t he at least look up any sta­tis­tics about the health of the people he’s writ­ing about?

Do I even need to describe why this is stupid? Is anyone taken in by this crap?

4 Responses to “Paleolithic Bologna”

1. I’m sure there are things that can be learned by study­ing the lives and diets of hunter gath­er­ers. But I doubt that Dr. B. is the one we should turn to. The first few sen­tences are hyper­bolic in their descrip­tion of the won­ders of diet.

   Part of what is miss­ing is a lack of under­stand­ing the diver­sity of diets one finds among such groups of people. For exam­ple, native arctic people have for mil­len­nia lived on an exclu­sively meat diet. And not even lean meat–it’s typ­i­cally a very high fat diet. Then there are the fairly bizarre diets found among prim­i­tive groups in Papua New Guinea, at least I think the con­sump­tion of the brains of other people is bizarre. And he doesn’t bother to men­tion that the life span of these prim­i­tive folk is con­sid­er­ably shorter than folks who are not hunter gath­er­ers. The reason they may not have arthri­tis, for exam­ple, is that they do not live long enough for it to develop. The same can be said for many of the other things listed. And people with mental ill­nesses have typ­i­cally been aban­doned by such groups and left to die on their own.

   That being said, there are a few advan­tages to being a hunter gath­erer. Per­haps the great­est is that they typ­i­cally only spend three to four hours a day work­ing. The rest of the time they relax and enjoy them­selves, often by killing their neigh­bors in raids. At least that’s what the Yanamomo and many Papua New Guineans do. Most of us are easily dou­bling that work sched­ule. One advan­tage hunter gath­er­ers have is that there are very few Repub­li­cans in their ranks and they never watch sit­u­a­tion come­dies, 24, Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader, or FOX News. That alone may be worth adopt­ing their life style.

   — skank September 14th, 2007 at 5:35 am #

2. See, that’s what I decided not to say because I knew some­body else would say it for me.

   Just another factor you didn’t men­tion: they have a MUCH higher infant mor­tal­ity rate. How that fac­tors into health later in life is an inter­est­ing ques­tion, but I’d hate to see some­body who thought that a diet like this was appro­pri­ate for a young child or a nurs­ing mother. The recent death of infants whose par­ents wanted to raise them as vegans has really raised my aware­ness to the inter­sec­tion of child­hood nutri­tion and “lifestyle diets.”

   Oh, and 24 rocks, as long as you’re aware that it’s fic­tion and not for­eign policy advice. :-)

   — Jemaleddin September 14th, 2007 at 10:44 am #

3. TB: Oh, and 24 rocks, as long as you’re aware that it’s fic­tion and not for­eign policy advice. :-)

   S: How many people do you sup­pose that is? At a can­di­date debate one of Repub­li­cans used it as a model of how the U.S. should deal with ter­ror­ists. No Repub­li­cans thought it worthy of men­tion. So there’s the 35% of the coun­try that is Repub­li­can. Does anyone else watch it?

   — skank September 14th, 2007 at 12:55 pm #

4. We watch it each year on DVD - it’s not real­is­tic at all, but it’s excit­ing and enter­tain­ing. Of course, the same can be said of Lost, Super­nat­ural or Heroes.

   We don’t watch it when it’s on TV because Kellie and I can’t deal with the cliff-​hangers. It’s just too tense.

   — Jemaleddin September 14th, 2007 at 1:39 pm #