Chris at The Healthy Skeptic has a great post up today. He, like me, is quite happy to see Kurt Harris back at PaNu. Chris’ Is Paleo even Paleo? And does it even matter? is his take on a guest post at PaNu about ancestral diets and whether anthropology can tell us anything about them (hint: it’s less than you’d think). Chris labels it as paleo ambiguity and offers this takeaway (emphasis his):
it’s impossible to know for certain what our paleolithic ancestors ate by studying modern HG people. It’s difficult even to know what modern HG people eat when a bunch of researchers aren’t hanging around watching them. …
So on the one hand you’ve got paleo fundamentalists claiming to know exactly what paleolithic people ate, and stating with apparent certainty that grains and legumes were absolutely not included in their diets. Then you’ve got folks on the other end of the spectrum who claim that paleo is a just another “fad diet”, like the Zone or Atkins, with absolutely no basis in clinical or anthropological evidence.
They’re both wrong, of course.
I agree entirely with his conclusion:
So yes, paleo may not actually be paleo. We will probably never know exactly what our paleo relatives ate.
My response to that? I couldn’t care less.
Why? Because we know enough about ancestral diets in a general sense to suggest that they are superior to modern diets for human health. And we know enough – thanks to current clinical research – about modern foods like flour, seed oils and sugar to know that we shouldn’t be eating them.
On a somewhat related note, Kurt had another post on PaNu today that touches a bit on what you might call paleo priorities. He writes (emphasis mine):
Cavemen, vibrams, bloodletting, raw foodism, “paleo” exercise (people tossed rocks back and forth in the paleolithic, are you serious??) - all these topics are trivial sideshows compared to the issue of what is right or wrong with modern diets and why. …
To my mind, killing the lipid hypothesis and exploring what might be the neolithic agents of disease take precedence over everything else.
It’s the end of a work week and I’m a bit fried, but I have a lot to say about this. Stay tuned …
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
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