An Urban's Rural View

If You Eat Like a Caveman, Should You Sleep Like One?

Urban C Lehner
By  Urban C Lehner , Editor Emeritus
Connect with Urban:

One of the hardest things to figure out about these fad diets that keep popping up is how many people practice them. The Paleo diet, which advocates eating only the kinds of foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate, is no exception.

The closest thing to a number-of-dieters statistic the New York Times could offer in an article headlined "The Paleo Lifestyle: The Way, Way, Way Back" was 100,000 page views a day for a Paleo-recipe blog. The Times also reported that Paleo was the most searched diet of 2013 on Google (http://tiny.cc/…) without offering any numbers.

But if we don't know how many practice Paleo, we do know it's creating cottage industries. The Times cites a proliferation of Paleo books, magazines, conferences, vacation retreats, blogs, liquors, cocktail recipes, sleep masks and beauty products.

Paleo, the newspaper concludes, can no longer be dismissed as "a fringe movement of shaggy-haired Luddites with an outsize taste for wild-boar meatloaf."

If you're a fan of offbeat journalism, you'll revel in the dense, deft detail the Times weaves into this account of what has evolved from a mere diet into a full-fledged caveman lifestyle.

If you're a corn, soybean or wheat grower, your enthusiasm for the article may be more restrained.

In some ways the Paleos are worse news for grain farmers than the vegans. Vegans consume at least some of what modern Midwestern farmers produce. Paleos think the ancients made a wrong turn 10,000 years ago when they started growing grains.

Evolution is slow, the Paleos argue, and the human body has yet to adapt to the new diet grain growing introduced. That's why Paleos eat -- more or less -- what the hunter-gatherers ate: Fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish and meat from grass-fed animals. (Hunter-gatherers didn't eat grains or grain-fed meat; neither do true Paleos.)

P[L1] D[0x0] M[300x250] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]

Many of those who've tried Paleo say they've lost weight and feel better. But so do many of those who've tried Atkins (which resembles Paleo without being as extreme), juicing, partial fasting and other fad diets. So, for that matter, do many vegans. We humans find ways to explain away doubts and enthusiastically congratulate ourselves on our choices of cars, mates and diets, to mention just a few objects of our tendency to self-congratulation.

Unfortunately there are no persuasive statistics supporting these fad diets. We just don't have enough years of experience with them.

The statistics on the health of hunter-gatherers have limitations, too, derived as they are mainly from fossils. On average cavemen lived short lives, with estimates ranging from 25 to 35 years. But Paleo devotees say averages deceive (http://tiny.cc/…) and they have a point.

By some estimates 30% to 40% of hunter-gatherers died in childbirth or infancy, weighing down average life expectancy. Those who survived to adulthood had a shot at living 70 years and more.

What ailed cavemen were gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases that modern medicine can cure. Heart disease and diabetes weren't the problems they are today.

So goes the Paleos' rationale, and let's assume for the sake of argument they're right about caveman health. Does it follow we have to give up grains to be healthy?

It isn't like we have statistics proving human health took a hit when crop cultivation began. As supporters of the Mediterranean diet -- yet another fad -- love to point out, many southern Europeans live to ripe old ages eating bread, pasta, vegetables and small quantities of fish and meat.

But true Paleo believers dismiss all doubts. Indeed, according to the Times, many Paleo fans have decided that the hunter-gatherers were not only right about food, they were right about everything.

Cavemen didn't give their children piano lessons, so Paleo parents play with their children in the wild instead. Mammals learn from unstructured play, the Paleos say. Cavemen had only natural cosmetics if they used any at all, so Paleos apply coconut oil or castor oil "to restore that Neanderthal glow to a woman's cheek."

Cavemen slept from sundown to sunrise. Most of today's neo-cavemen don't go that far, but some turn off their light-emitting appliances at 8 p.m. -- or wear amber goggles when taking nighttime peeks at their iPhones to block out blue-spectrum light.

If the not-quite-caveman sleep routine is a small departure from the pure Paleolithic path, Paleo cocktails are a big one. Cavemen didn't drink. Paleo followers make some bows to the hunter-gatherers, like avoiding beer (all those grains!). But they give themselves dispensations on certain tipples they deem Paleo-friendly, like those made from Tequila.

Aren't fads fun? "Everything in moderation" is so boring by comparison.

If there's comfort for grain growers in any of this, it's the thought that Paleo's extremism probably limits its popular appeal.

In the long run how many will embrace this stark regime? How many will stick with it? It may be the most-searched diet of 2013 but it's hard to believe it will ever be the most-practiced.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(ES)

P[] D[728x170] M[320x75] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]
P[L2] D[728x90] M[320x50] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]

Comments

To comment, please Log In or Join our Community .

tcosby1802103574
12/19/2017 | 7:08 PM CST
Pillows for side sleepers are pillows manufacture especially for people who sleep on the side.