Stone Agers in the Fast Lane?

A destruction of Paleo Diet™ as a management tool for metabolic syndrome in modern humans surfaced recently in a tweet from Miki Ben-Dor, along with his comment that he views meat as the default paleo food.

Plants used as "food" come and go and are nowadays developed in to reduced toxicity versions which are what we call vegetables. Meat is meat and even the invention of factory farming does not seem to be able to convert it in to anything as toxic as a courgette. Remember this?

Courgette stew kills pensioner in Heidelberg

Anyway, back to the Pacific Islanders. This is the book chapter we're interested in and it's entertaining.

Stone Agers in the Fast Lane? How Bioarchaeologists Can Address the Paleo Diet Myth

These people appear to have read (and cite) essentially every paper on gout in archeological record of the paleo Pacific Islander population. They are using gout as a skeletally preserved marker for metabolic syndrome, a fairly reasonable approach to my mind. The assumption that meat causes gout (lots of purines don'tchano) which is threaded throughout the chapter is less acceptable.

So we end up with this as a core summing up close to the end, for anyone who doesn't want to slog through the various straw men they set up to knock down:

"We have also used a case study of Pacific Islanders’ experiences with MetS and paleopathology evidence of gout to reexamine the very basis for the “necessity” of a return to a Paleo Diet. As discussed, the ancestral diet (based on tuberous root crops, not cereals) and population history of Pacific islanders are completely different to the Old and New Worlds where the Paleo Diet debate is entrenched. Yet the burden of MetS is extremely high in the Pacific. While the adoption of westernized diets has exacerbated the expression of MetS conditions in modern Polynesians, the paleopathological evidence (especially gout) suggests the origins of these conditions stems from their Lapita ancestors, who in turn trace their roots back to Island Southeast Asia".

Gout was widespread in the pre-Westernisation Pacific Islanders, despite their paleo diet. The core quote re this paleo diet is that it is "based on tuberous root crops, not cereals".

Translation: A Paleo Diet diet based on paleo tuberous root crops gives you paleo gout.

Eat some meat and get your calories from fat. Vegetables can be viewed as a recreational indulgence if you so wish. But maybe don't over do them unless you want Paleo Diet™ gout.

Peter