Cordain - A A R Pthe Paleo Answer

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Contents

Also by Loren Cordain

The Paleo Diet

The Paleo Diet Cookbook (with Lorrie Cordain and Nell Stephenson)

The Paleo Diet for Athletes (with Joe Friel)

The Dietary Cure for Acne

Copyright 2012 by Loren Cordain. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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For Lorrie and the Boys

Preface

I think its important to give you a history of the Paleo Diet concept. The Paleo Diet and Paleo in general have recently become very hot topics. These ideas have become household words in the last few years; however, it hasnt always been this way. On the next page is a graph from Google Trends for the words Paleo Diet.

Its clear from this graph that the Paleo Diet was unknown to all but dedicated fans until three years ago. Fortunately, Ive been in the middle of this worldwide movement nearly from its beginnings.

Last October, I approached my sixtieth birthday with some trepidation. I was part of the 1960s generation whose mantra was not to trust anyone over thirty, and now Im twice that age. As I look back over my life, I can pinpoint a few key events that led me to discover and appreciate the Paleo Diet.

I came of age as a track and field athlete at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, and I was always interested in diet, fitness, and athletic performance. Later as lifeguards at Lake Tahoe, my friends and I read all of the now-classic vegetarian diet and health books such as Francis Moore Lapps Diet for a Small Planet , Paivo Airolas Are You Confused? and Dick Gregorys Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat , among others. I attended a Dick Gregory lecture in Seattle and got to shake the famous comedians hand. My lifeguard friends and I experimented with vegan diets, fasting, and all kinds of vitamins and supplements. Almost everyone seemed to own a juicer.

Google Trends Search for Paleo Diet

Each summer, instead of shying away from the sun and using sunscreens, we all tried to get the deepest tans possible. We swam in Tahoes icy, invigorating, nonchlorinated waters, and decades before Vibram Five Fingers and Nike Frees (shoes that mimic bare feet) were the rage, we ran barefoot in the sand along Sand Harbors pristine shoreline. Those twenty memorable summers as a lifeguard at Tahoe heightened my awareness of the outdoor, natural world, sunshine, health, fitness, and diet.

I completed my Ph.D. in exercise physiology at the University of Utah in the spring of 1981 and was promptly hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University. For the first five to ten years of my career, my research focused mainly on how diet and exercise affected fitness and athletic performance. I still hadnt encountered Paleo, but I read widely and had a considerable interest in anthropology.

In the spring of 1987, I happened upon Boyd Eaton, M.D.s now-classic scientific paper Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications, which had been published two years earlier in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine . This article made a lasting impression on me; it was the single factor that caused me to focus my research interests on ancestral human diets from that point forward.