[nl]

I don't understand your point about the Paleo diet.

I just Googled, and apparently the "ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy" is a talking point of pro-Paleo websites. This is a good point (although it seems to ignore the high mortality rate of women during childbirth), but seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the article.

Ignoring that, it seemed a reasonably well thought-out counterpoint to another fad diet.

[paulgb]

I think the issue is that 40 years seems to be extrapolated from an average, but the distribution of human lifespans (especially in pre-modern times) is bi-modal so the average doesn't tell you much about how long they lived conditioned on reaching adulthood. I found mostly questionable-looking paleo-diet related results as well, but to their credit the chain of citations led back to peer-reviewed research such as this:

> we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. Of those who reach age 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers and 61 percent of forager-horticulturalists reach age 45. The acculturated hunter-gatherers show lower young adult mortality rates, with 79 percent surviving to age 45, conditional on reaching age 15.

http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/gurvenlab/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.ed...

[nl]

Sure, I agree it's a good point. But it does seem to be a fairly minor point in the whole article, and I really don't understand what the OP's point was.

Was it just they didn't like the criticism of paleo? Because honestly, to me publishing reasonably well thought out criticism of anything seems exactly what a good newspaper should do.

[darkerside]

> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects.

You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.

[ejstronge]

>> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects.

> You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.

This is a false equivalency.

Science requires experiments to support or refute hypotheses. The fact that new experiments may cause us to revisit a theory does not mean that one can assert any arbitrary theory to be correct.

[darkerside]

Where did I assert any theory as being correct. Stop twisting my words. You're seeing an agenda where there isn't one.