Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

As the Paleo diet movement seems to continue to grow and grow, the dogma continues to irk me. It, like any other diet, isn't good or bad by name - it depends upon execution. I have minor concerns related to some certain nutrients, like calcium and fiber/potassium (depending on how meat based the diet is), and concerns over the severe lack of long term data on the diet, that makes it difficult to say if it has any effect on cancer/CVD/osteoporosis risk. There's a lot of theory suggesting it's superiority - see here -, that lacks any strong clinical basis, which makes it hard for any evidence-based clinician to recommend long-term to anyone, or to know who could benefit most from these theoretical benefits. Clinical concerns aside, the evolutionary 'science' of Paleo just irks the hell out of me- I've talked about it some before here . My undergraduate degree is in biological anthropology and I focused on understanding how metabolism/nutrients/foods may have act...

berkley.edu With the ever growing emphasis on understanding how human nutrient needs evolved, I think it's pertinent to remember all of the forces of evolution -- I said back when I first started this blog that there's a strong chance that specific human populations likely have nutrition/metabolism variants related to the forces of evolution besides selection in a specific nutritope. Recent evidence suggests that gene flow may have played quite an important role in the evolution of metabolism. This evidence stems from the recent sequencing of a high quality Neanderthal genome by Svaante Paabo's group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, leading evolutionary biologists and anthropologists to suggest that ancestral populations interbred with Neanderthals. Neanderthals and humans likely diverged from their last common ancestor, which has eluded paleoanthropologists (1), about 1 mya; however, molecular clock data suggests a more recent LCA (2). Nea...