Janna:

That's absolutely true in my experience.  If you're eating 'paleo' and still getting junk food cravings, odds are you're still trying to follow the Faileo Diet, e.g. 'low-fat' paleo as advocated by Cordain and (I think) DeVany.  I'm glad it's working for you!

Kenny:

Thanks for the encouragement.  These articles take some time to write, and it helps to know that others find them useful even if they don't want to argue about the topic!

Bodhi:

It's an interesting evolutionary niche, and there will most likely be another post about the details of how we got there.  Humans are very strange animals!

Edwin:

That sounds delicious!  I cooked a prime rib roast the other day, and ate all of it over the next two days: gristle, giant fat chunks, everything.  The more fat I eat along with meat, the better I feel -- and I usually finish off dessert with some Greek yogurt which is over 3/4 fat!

Bill:

That's fascinating to speculate on, but I have no idea how one would go about investigating it.  But as I point out here, hunters were most likely far smarter than the agriculturalists that followed them...and their powers of observation and tracking would seem magical to any of us.

Tim:

Yes, low-fat dogma provides us with cheap fat.  I get free trimmings from the local butcher sometimes (although recently I got lazy and just bought a bunch of beef tallow outright).

That's so great that your little kid likes pemmican!  It's a crime what most people feed their kids: slamming them instantly from a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet of mother's milk (necessary to grow a baby) immediately onto sugary, low-protein, low-fat pablum.  And then we wonder why so many are diabetic!  If we want our children to grow smart, healthy, and strong, we need to feed them eggs and fatty meat.

And kids basically want to eat what you're eating.  If you're constantly sucking down candy and danishes with a look of bliss on your face, that's what they'll want too.  But if you're eating real food, that's what they'll want.  Babies don't know facts, but they know emotions perfectly...and they can tell when you're faking it.

Nax:

Much appreciated!  Stick around, I've got plenty more to say.

Brian:

Humans have no absolute need for carbohydrate: we can run mostly on ketones, and gluconeogenesis can provide enough glucose for us to live on.

That being said, it may be less than optimally healthy to do so.  The Jaminets note that we convert ~15-20% of energy to glucose if we don't eat it directly, so we might as well eat that 15-20% ourselves and spare our body the extra effort.  (Unless we're trying to lose weight or maintain ketosis for other reasons, like treating epileptic seizures.)

Thanks to everyone for contributing!  Regular feedback helps keep me writing.  And please spread these articles around: they're written to be understandable outside the paleo community.  We already know this stuff, entertaining though it is: it's the people with IBS, autoimmune disease, insulin resistance, and/or trapped in yo-yo diet hell who need to see it.  Hell, everyone should see it, because even if (like me) you have no frank diseases or problems, you'll still feel far better on an evolutionary suitable diet of high-fat paleo.

JS

Daniel:

It's clear that modern humans have the facility to eat tubers: the question is when that become important for our evolution.

Richard Wrangham claims that tuber-eating was the primary driver for leaving the equatorial forests, but "Catching Fire" makes claims about the domestication of fire ~1.6 MYA that are, to say the least, not universally accepted.  I think the case for bone marrow and brain consumption in the Pliocene (both very high in fat) is stronger, and that tuber-eating would have been at best contemporaneous with scavenging marrow and brains from dead megafauna, and at worst would have followed it.

"Eating only fat and meat" isn't appetizing?  I disagree, especially in evolutionary time.  Pliocene hominids didn't have butter to spread on tubers, let alone fire to cook them: raw marrow, raw meat, and even raw brains beat raw ancestral yams and cassava.

Dana:

Termite-eating is well-known and understood, even if eating of other bugs is less so. All apes eat the bugs they groom off of each other AFAIK. And plenty of Asian cultures eat bugs: I think bug-phobia is mainly a Western thing.

I agree that starch was probably a fallback: go hungry for a day or two, and you'll very quickly find you're inclined to eat just about anything that doesn't immediately kill you. Remember it's our ability to survive bad times that limits our evolutionary success, not our ability to get fat in good times.

Chris:

Writing these articles is part of my own learning process: if I can't explain things on a level most people can understand, odds are good I don't really understand it myself.  If I've really done my job, what I wrote will seem obvious, like common sense…but it's only common sense unless you understand the facts behind it and how they fit together.

I'm working on an index to the site so that people can find information more quickly…look for it in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks so much for supporting and spreading gnolls.org!

JS