[6mins] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzA-E8zb-Ds

[1hour] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149#

The science behind paleo exercise, however, isn’t the best. Bodybyscience.net is what you want for the best in exercise science.

As to your wider point – I don’t think many people will disagree with you that making a huge part of your life about one thing is unhealthy. But equating an entire health movement with one obsessive guy in new york is just dumb. And the raw meat thing he does? very weird. not paleo.

Ryan, I typically agree with you, but I think you’re way off on this point.

I think the payoff of investing a portion of your efforts into living what you believe is a healthy lifestyle (I personally believe that the science behind the paleo diet is sound; it’s just not mainstream) is worth the cost. The improvements in energy, confidence, health, and lifespan will make the rest of your endeavors in life more fulfilling, more worthwhile, and likely easier. This is a BIG DEAL and not merely a distraction. I don’t want to argue for the diet itself – there is information out there – and apparently your point holds whether or not the science is sound so we don’t even have to agree on this point.

Agreed that a person can go too far and make something like diet/fitness the sole or major focus of their life, and so I agree that this type of behavior is a distraction. I remind myself about this point every once in a while so that I don’t fall into this trap even a little. I think that one can implement a “paleo” or other diet with a degree of moderation so that it takes up minimal additional time and effort and simply becomes part of the routine. I think that taking care of one’s physical well-being is a critical component to taking care of one’s mental well-being. I can’t imagine you truly disagree with this and wonder whether you’re just picking on this particular group?

Not sure how often you delve into medical literature, but amongst the evidence-based fitness crowd this article got quite a lot of discussion. You can look it up at PubMed:

Mercader J. Mozambican grass seed consumption during the middle stone age. Science. (2009) 326(5960):1680-3.

I’ll quote the abstract, important parts bolded…

“The role of starchy plants in early hominin diets and when the culinary processing of starches began have been difficult to track archaeologically. Seed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time. A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age stone tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.”

This pretty much destroys all credibility of the Paleo diet which, as you mentioned, maintains that grains and dairy are the source of all modern disease, including our growing obesity epidemic.

Cordain and Eaton, the two big Paleo proponents, relied on what’s known as The Ethnographic Atlas. This was a work done by non-scientists that recorded (sort-of) what non-modernized people were eating. The work is so horribly flawed and laughable that it fails to display any predicative efficacy under critical analysis.

Nice post as usual.

Why wouldn’t it? Not to delve into irrelevant hypotheticals, but let’s say the science these ‘paleo dieters’ were using was excellent, reputed, and widely circulated to possibly benefit others. This is still wankery? Is this not a contribution at some level? Why not? And where would it make sense for this 20-something man to live while developing this dieting idea?

I get your central point I think, but I don’t see how diverting some attention to human physicality is itself a distraction or a bad thing. This is why I asked my first question.

Or maybe I’m badly missing something here.

This guy, a 20-something man living in New York City, the epicenter of the modern world right there in front of him, zones in on our diet not being primitive enough? Yeah, that is the problem.

It’s wankery.

Your gripe is about the way people borrow ideas and apply them to ill-fitting contexts, basically creating a nicely packaged and pseudo-scientific ‘fad’ lacking any decent amount of underlying substance…and thus is a distraction to be avoided. Is this correct?