I just started the paleo diet a month ago and so far I've lost 14 pounds and I feel much better each and every day. I also sleep deeper, clear my throat less, and have... shall we say... a suddenly more normal GI tract. Thank you J Stanton for an article that, in terms of emotional appeal and motivation factor, easily outstrips anything else I've read on the subject (including Mark's Daily Apple, which is awesome). And it's loaded with facts and great advice, too!

I think I'm the only paleo dieter who finds it extremely difficult to stop drinking milk. People lament the loss of cheese all the time, but for me it's milk. I love milk--it's my liquid comfort food. I also still have morning coffee (although less than I used to) and I love to unwind after a long day with a glass of red wine (or two). I think I'm 90% "strict", though. I've got a ways to go for my ideal weight, so I'll just keep going.

Thanks again!

[...] Paleo in 6 Easy Steps – Gnolls.org (Awesome, simple description of Paleo) [...]

"but if you’re still eating corn, oats, or any bogus ‘health grains’ like kamut or amaranth, ditch them."

Weston A. Price, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, seems to recommend oats consumption. He writes:

The basic foods of these islanders are fish and oat products with a little barley. Oat grain is the one cereal which develops fairly readily, and it provides the porridge and oat cakes which in many homes are eaten in some form regularly with each meal. The fishing about the Outer Hebrides is specially favorable, and small sea foods, including lobsters, crabs, oysters and clams, are abundant. An important and highly relished article of diet has been baked cod's head stuffed with chopped cod's liver and oatmeal. The principal port of the Isle of Lewis is Stornoway with a fixed population of about four thousand and a floating population of seamen over week-ends, of an equal or greater number. The Sunday we spent there, 450 large fishing boats were said to be in the port for the week-end. Large quantities of fish are packed here for foreign markets. These hardy fisherwomen often toil from six in the morning to ten at night. The abundance of fish makes the cost of living very low.

In Fig. 5 may be seen three of these fisher-people with teeth of unusual perfection.
[...]
On one of these islands, we were told, the growing boys and girls had exceedingly high immunity to tooth decay. Their isolation was so great that a young woman of about twenty years of age who came to the Isle of Harris from Taransay Island had never seen milk in any larger quantity than drops. There are no dairy animals on that island. Their nutrition is provided by their oat products and fish
[...]
The older boy, with excellent teeth, was still enjoying primitive food of oatmeal and oatcake and sea foods with some limited dairy products.
[...]
For nutrition, the children of this community were dependent very largely on oatmeal porridge, oatcake and sea foods. An examination of the growing boys and girls disclosed the fact that only one tooth out of every hundred examined had ever been attacked by tooth decay. The general physical development of these children was excellent, as may be seen in the upper half of Fig. 7.
[...]
FIG. 7. Above: typical rugged Gaelic children, Isle of Harris, living on oats and sea food.
[...]
This is in striking contrast with the picture of the girl shown in Fig. 6 (lower right) living in the Isle of Lewis, in the central area. She has splendidly formed dental arches and a high immunity to tooth decay. Her diet and that of her parents was oatmeal porridge and oatcake and fish which built stalwart people.
[...]
A dietary program competent to build stalwart men and women and rugged boys and girls is provided the residents of these barren Islands, with their wind and storm-swept coasts, by a diet of oats used as oatcake and oatmeal porridge; together with fish products, including some fish organs and eggs.
[...]
The diet of the people in the Outer Hebrides which proved adequate for maintaining a high immunity to dental caries and preventing deformity consisted chiefly of oat products and sea foods [...] One important fish dish was baked cod's head that had been stuffed with oat meal and chopped cods' livers. This was an important inclusion in the diets of the growing children. The oats and fish, including livers, provided minerals and vitamins adequate for an excellent racial stock with high immunity to tooth decay.
[...]
The important change that I made in this boy's dietary program was the removal of the white flour products and in their stead the use of freshly cracked or ground wheat and oats

[...] A good paleo article! Eat like a predator, not like prey. [...]

"I agree with them on everything else"

...Except, perhaps, Guideline 14, which recommends we "Use natural sweeteners [...] such as raw honey, maple syrup, dehydrated cane sugar juice", contrary to your advice in the article to "not eat table sugar, or its equivalents [including] circumlocutions like “brown rice syrup”, “agave nectar”, and [...] “evaporated cane juice solids.” [...] Even honey"

Sounds great, but what about people that HAVE to watch their cholesterol levels. My doctor has always told me to eat red meat in moderation (though I do LOVE it!)

the most important number you'll get off your test (and the only one with a meaningful correlation to heart disease) is your triglycerides/HDL ratio.

What about apo B? From Gary Taubes' 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories:

Goran Walldius, a cardiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, [...] is the principal investigator of an enormous Swedish study to ascertain heart-disease risk factors. The 175,000 subjects include every patient who received a health checkup in the Stockholm area in 1985. Blood samples were taken at the time, and Walldius and his colleagues have been following the subjects ever since, to see which measures of cholesterol, triglycerides, or lipoproteins are most closely associated with heart disease. Far and away, the best predictor of risk, as Walldius reported in 2001, was the concentration of apo B proteins, reflecting the dominance of small, dense LDL particles. Half of the patients who died of heart attacks, he reported, had normal LDL-cholesterol levels but high apo B numbers. Apo B is a much better predictor of heart disease than LDL cholesterol, Walldius said, because LDL cholesterol “doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the LDL.”