That seems like a bizarre example... there are plenty of other stuff that will hang around for a long time. Building ruins will be around for millions of years. Radioactive waste will be around for a long time too (which is why it's so hard to deal with). If there were any civilizations like us in Earth's past, we'd definitely know about them.

By the way, I know you mentioned 0.1% milk in another comment, but the 'drinking milk' that most people buy ranges from 1% reduced-fat milk to 3.3% 'full fat' milk.

I don't know why you feel the need to keep inflating your numbers, even after I've pointed out they're wrong (and you've admitted that you're wrong). You're not off by a factor of 10, you're off by a factor of 100.

Very few bars of chocolate contain 100 g of fat. A snickers bar contains 14 g. I choose it because it's a particularly fatty bar and I wanted to be fair to you. A Mars bar contains less: 11 g, as does a nestle milk chocolate bar.

A freaking meat pie (like http://files.exclusivelyfood.c...) contains 27 g of fat, and that's a lot (it's about the same as a big mac). There are very few foods you eat throughout your day that have 100 g of fat. You'd have to eat five steaks or 3-4 big macs to get that amount of fat in your body.

> in what way are the following dietary guidelines un-sound?

I've been telling you but it seems you lack reading comprehension as well. They're unsound because they are not based on any solid medical evidence, they unnecessarily restrict the types of food people can eat (which leads to many problems on its own, including health problems in many cases), and for all we know they could actually be harmful (too much focus on meat, for one, is _known_ to be harmful).

> is why it's curious that you'd be so invested in whining about it.

I'm not singling out paleo, if that's what you mean. I call out all bullshit equally, whether it's Atkins or paleo or the apple juice diet or whatever Oprah's plugging.

Wrong. A snickers bar contains 14 grams of fat. For 3% milk, that comes out to about 470 grams, or just less than 2 cups. For 'skim' 1.5% milk, twice that, or 3.7 cups. A lot of people drink that much milk for breakfast.

20 liters of 3% milk contains 600 grams of fat. That's a large brick of butter.

How is linking to a meta-meta-study (which includes one of AC's cited studies in it) 'dismissing' anything?

> Yes, because humans congregating into high population density areas have a much lower rate of violence than small bands of humans sprinkled all over the countryside.

Yes, they do, in fact. When people started congregating together in large numbers, they had to learn to 'love thy neighbor' to avoid existential risks. This they did through law and religion. Whereas a bunch of 'small bands of humans sprinkled over the countryside', as you say, were only loyal to the other people in their band and would go across the valley and slaughter the other band every time they went hungry. This isn't even something that takes a lot of digging to find out: it's actually part of documented history and used to be quite commonplace in places like the Arabian desert or New Zealand until quite recently.

> The notion that people would suddenly find themselves under evolutionary pressure to preserve heat when they had better-insulated permanent dwellings and an excess source of energy from farming, but they wouldn't find themselves under pressure when they were nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers is a bit far-fetched, don't you think?

Climate adaptation is just one example. There are many others.

> Diet and nutrition is certainly important in maintaining an effective immune system. Yes, sanitation would have come into play as man moved into permanent settlements, but it's a big stretch to think that diet and nutrition are completely unrelated to disease rates and immunity.

Life expectancy decrease due to disease would not have been related to quality of diet.

> Hard to say - which is why you've spent all this time in this thread announcing to all of us that any so-called hunter-gatherer diet *IS* unhealthier than the alternatives?

Where have I ever said that? And please don't point me to the 'paleo diet' - it's about as related to the actual diets of paleolithic peoples as pasta salad is to a rotting log of wood.

> Your argument mostly seems to be "Paleo is invalid because it's not how ACTUAL CAVEMEN ate 10,000 years ago!"

No, my argument is that paleo is stupid pseudoscientific trash that has no place in any reasonable discussion of nutrition. The fact that actual 'cavemen' didn't eat that way is just further proof that it's stupid, because one of its selling points is that 'this is the diet the human body evolved for.' A clever scheme that its advocates use to avoid criticism (if the human body evolved for this diet, it must be healthy!)

> Let's agree that the "Paleo" diet should have a better name since stone age cavemen didn't eat that way, okay?

You and I might be able to agree on that but a lot of paleo advocates can't, because if they did, their entire business model would break down. They'd have to do the hard work of explaining why a diet of 'low carbs, seafood, nuts, and vegetables' is better than any of the 1000's of other similar diets that have cropped up over the years and have generally been debunked.

> Explain to me what, exactly, is unhealthy about the recommendations of the Paleo diet, rather than whining that "it's not really a stone age diet."

Well, too much emphasis on meat, for one. For example, as described by this link: http://thepaleodiet.com/the-pa...

But even if it's a perfectly healthy diet, that doesn't it's better than the modern agricultural diet. There is no need to reduce complex carbs, no need to eliminate legumes, and no need to blindly eliminate all processed foods from your diet.

> Are you confusing "eat more grass fed lean meat and fresh fish and seafood" with "eat nothing but meat?" I think you must be.

Huh? I think you're the one who's confused here. Fresh fish and seafood is meat, last time I checked.

You can't just pick and choose studies to fit your claims. Meta-analyses aren't primary sources. Here's a meta-meta-analysis for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... There's plenty of links on that page showing primary research establishing a link between saturated fat and CHD.

You got the basal metabolic rate right (1700 kcal/day sounds reasonable) but you're vastly underestimating additional calories burned due to activity. Activity isn't just biking to work. It includes food digestion, walking, thermogenesis (this is the biggest factor in winter), and thinking. None of these are included in BMR. I think 800 kcal/day is highly reasonable for these activities, which gives 2500 kcal/day, as I said.

The lactose tolerance gene developed in mountainous regions around the world where ability to drink milk would have greatly increased survival due to relative shortage of other food sources.

> Pretty much by definition mlik contains all the vitamins and nutrients a mammal needs

So do plants and vegetables. Vitamin deficiency is not a problem that most people living in first world countries need to be worried about.

You'll have to explain to me why it "directly contradicts" my claim. That study is very specific on being on post-menopausal women, not men. And it's not that they couldn't find a link, it's just that the sample size was not high enough to make any definitive conclusions. This is understandable as women have lower risk for heart disease than men and so you need a proportionately larger sample to draw correlation.

As for the first link, I don't see how it relates in any way to what I'm saying. You're imaging I'm saying something I'm not, and then replying to this imaginary straw man.

Eat less meat, it's getting to your head.

The problem with various paleo diets is that they are either not paleo, not healthy, or both.

Hunter-gatherers didn't eat like that. No combination of foodstuffs from your local market could even resemble what they ate. See this talk, it's informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And where are the insects? Yes, paleolithic diets included meat, but what most people don't tell you is that a lot of that was insect meat. Beetles, moth larvae, witchetty grubs, even cockroaches - our ancestors loved that shit. It was an important part of the diet too, because there were long periods were people did not have access to any other type of lean meat. Insect meat contains proteins and vitamins in higher concentrations than many other types of meat.

Paleo advocates love to say that you should eat more meat. Actually, evidence from preserved cooking fires and teeth shows that 70% of the calories of the actual paleo diet came from plant matter. Since meat is so much more calorie-rich than plants, this basically means they spent most of their day chewing on plants. And when I say chewing, I mean it - their idea of vegetables wasn't succulent, easy-to-eat, delicious modern broccoli or carrots or potatoes. It was tough plant fibers and roots. Most of which had very little calorie value. Some of which were even poisonous (they avoided death by rotating between different types of poisons to avoid overdose on any single one). If you want to spend all day chewing on toxic wild roots, be my guest. I'm going to go for the nutrient-rich, vitamin-rich, mineral-rich marvels of modern agriculture that can be found in my supermarket.

It's useless to argue with people like that. If someone is incapable of the basic logical reasoning to figure out that an all-meat diet is not healthy, they've probably already damaged their brain through malnutrition far beyond the point where you could reason with them.

Well I've been paying attention to nutritional science and I'm not. Where are the studies and the evidence? So far all evidence points to saturated fat being a risk factor for heart disease, and I have never seen any evidence saying otherwise.

Obviously it's not like you're going to have a heart attack after having some butter on toast. But if you have steak every day for 50 years, then don't be surprised if you wind up with clogged arteries.