Photos of "mediocre looking" nearly naked people offer damning evidence that the Paleo diet is bunk.

To paraphrase Dr Lalonde in his AHS '11 presentation , observing uncontrolled phenomena provides us with a spot to generate hypotheses, not make conclusions. 

I was just over on Matt Stone's site, 180degreehealth.com. I hadn't been there before, and although he's not a fan of the Paleo diet gig, I've got no beef with him, and although I haven't listened to his presentation at the Paleo Summit yet, I'm looking forward to it.

Within the comments about the nifty Paleo Summit that Mr. Stone is a part of, someone posted a link to this news story about an "uncontacted" Peruvian tribe known as the Mashco-Piro and their violent brushes with modern society, which are evidently due to logging and other "civilized" activity pushing them out of their traditional territory.
First off, I find the use of the term "uncontacted" a rather poor choice of terms. Isolated, yes. Apparently violently xenophobic, yes. Completely uncontacted, no. Uncontacted (for whatever it means here) does not mean unmolested, unchanged, or unaffected by activities of the modern societies around them. To assume it does would be to assume that they lived in a bubble or in an alternate dimension. Which brings me to Mr. Stone's comment:

Yes, that picture will probably make it into the Paleo book, along with several other pics of primitive hunter-gatherers looking mediocre at best.

Here's the photo he's referring to:

Which is actually found on the front page of www.uncontactedtribes.org without cropping: 

Looking into the Uncontacted Tribes site, here is another pic of the same gentleman who is apparently very mediocre looking by Mr. Stone's standards:

Which begs the question, what would qualify as "top-notch"? Again, using uncontrolled and unverifiable observations, I don't see anyone in the photo who would qualify as obese by our standards. I don't see any evidence of acne on the younger people in the photos, and what's more, if you say anything bad about him, he will cut you with his capybara tooth-tipped wood knife. How many people in modern-day America are not obese, lacking acne, are willing to be photographed nearly naked, and have a kick-ass wood knife?

So I guess mediocre is a subjective term.

Issues I raised in his comment thread (still awaiting moderation as of this post) included the reliability of judging an entire people's health due to diet based off of the pictures of one family. Further, how has the illegal logging affected their diet and lifestyle? Have they moved to or from a monocrop supported diet? What were they like a hundred or two hundred years ago? These are the beginnings of hypotheses, not conclusions.

We can really go down the untestable question rabbit hole if we want: These people were able to be photographed. Why? What made them amenable to the photos? Did they know about the photos? Are they behaving differently than the other members of their tribe, such that the photos were able to be taken? Then we can get into whether or not these people are eating a paleo-traditional diet, a neo-traditional (traditional with comparatively new additions due to contact w/ the outside world) diet, or a completely "western" diet. Are these people even members of the Mashco-Piro? And on, and on...

Ultimately I can't answer those questions. What I can do is appreciate these people for whatever vestige of their traditional culture they've got left.

Other Paleo blogs and books have showed pictures of well-muscled, lean hunter gatherers, many of whom look like they hunted and gathered at the local Globo-Gym. If one had the time to waste we could start comparing pics of subjectively crappy or healthy looking indigenous peoples and get into quite the pissing match, considering that one's definition of crappy or mediocre varies based on a number of biases. If I were to go the academic route and pursue my Master's in Anthro, maybe I'd compile all the pictures of all the indigenous peoples in existence and make a big flip book so as to finally confirm the body composition of foraging/hunter-gatherer/preagricultural societes. But I don't have that much time. 

Here's an idea for another fun project. Photograph all indigenous peoples. Then photograph all "civilized" people. Then compare the percentages of those two groups who have outward-yes, just outward-signs of chronic diseases, impaired glucose control, sleep deprivaton, osteoporosis, diabetes, heart disease, venous hypertension, etc. Despite the variation in native diet, I would surmise that the people not eating processed crap and getting no sleep or exercise will be less "mediocre."

Ultimately, photos are a nice visual way of conveying a lot of information, but when it comes to proving or disproving the validity of any eating approach, they don't hold a lot of weight in my eyes. They are crystalized representations of time and place and person. A comprehensive, longitudinal photo-documentation of people out in the world and of participants in any dietary studies like those of Dr. Lindeberg would be quite nice, but still, they are only one facet of the whole deal.  

Until then, I shall rely on Dr. Lalonde's advice and hypothesize that a paleo-esqe diet is better for me than a western diet, and I will keep carrying out my own little N=1 experiment to test that hypothesis.

Paleo Summit is coming soon!

In the last year we've seen the launch of the Ancestral Health Symposium, the Paleo f(x) seminar is coming soon, and more events are sure to follow. Unfortunately there are many, many people like myself who cannot make it to Boston or Austin this year for these events (such are the joys of a full-time college student).

Sean's summit is the answer! Starting tomorrow and running for eight days, we can watch video presentations of many of the thought leaders of the paleo/primal movement. He and the presenters have put a ton of work into it and I'm looking forward to watching and learning. If you're interested in doing the same, follow the link below! The presentations, products of hard work by Sean and the presenters, are FREE during the summit!

Underground Wellness' Paleo Summit

If you're interested in digging deeper into the guts of the Paleo diet and lifestyle, this is a great place to start.

The Overgrown Gentleman's Hobby Farm

I recently read a 2011 article from PNAS titled "Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was note more productive than foraging." 

(The author, Samuel Bowles, has a PhD in economics from Harvard, and his analysis of early farming and foraging is pretty interesting. I'm not sure why I haven't seen it around the paleo-sphere.)

If statistical analysis gets you all hot and bothered, this article is for you. It's not a dry read, though. I quite enjoyed it. The parts of the paper that stand out to me are his analysis of the costs and risks of the delayed returns inherent to farming and his conclusions.

Farming is commonly associated with being capable of generating more food per acre than foraging, but Bowles identifies several other factors that weigh against a sizable yield. In no particular order:

• Costs of storage. Someone's gotta maintain the stores, prevent spoilage, deter theft, etc
• Decreasing dietary breadth and its associated diseases of deficiency.
• Cost of delayed return (as Bowles put it, we are impatient creatures).
• Risk of crop failure.

 (Mind you, these are not all of the factors in Dr. Bowles' paper, just some that stood out to me)
Ultimately Bowles does some stats magic that causes a non-math person like myself to stare off into space and think about chewing tin-foil, and when the magic is all said and done,

Average productivity levels in cultivation appear to be in the neighborhood of three-fifths of the returns to foraging wild species, depending on the adjustment. 

 Why, then, would we even go the way of agriculture? In the discussion section, Bowles notes that if a group were to abandon the least efficient sections of their food gathering (such as hunting for snark), and instead turn their time to a minimal amount of intentionally-planted crops, the average return of the crops will initially beat the returns usually seen while snark hunting or foraging for marginal plant foods. I take that to mean that on a certain scale, cultivation had a lot going for it. However, like investors who dump a diversified portfolio to devote all of their cash to a single nicely performing stock, early farmers chased the specter of huge returns at the expense of nutrition and adoption of risk, until their assessments of foraging productivity were skewed by the farming itself.

It's a fascinating paper and I do hope you'll all read it.