Paleofuturism for the Man; Archeofuturism for the People
Jack Donovan1,196 words
There are 3 types of people in the world: People who haven’t heard of the paleo diet, people who have tried the paleo diet, and people who can’t wait to tell you how stupid it is.
People in the last group want to tell you how we’re still evolving, how different groups evolved differently, how you couldn’t live like our ancestors even if you tried, how the paleo diet isn’t sustainable for the world’s growing population, how SCIENCE! can produce superior health and athleticism, and how all that meat and fat will make you obese and give you a heart attack.
None of these objections are very good responses to positions paleo advocates actually advocate.
Of course humans are still evolving. Of course different groups adapted to different environments and circumstances. (My 23andme profile — SCIENCE! — says I’m probably not lactose intolerant based on my ancestry, and I’m not, so I ignore the anti-dairy aspects of paleo that could be completely relevant for someone else.) No one is saying you should or could actually live exactly as our primitive ancestors did in the modern world. The world’s growing population is not sustainable, full-stop. And no, everything produced in a lab is not evil. Yes, some of it is very helpful. But, given the recent history of SCIENCE! telling us something is good for us — and then 20 years of deaths and side-effects later, DISCOVERING! that it is actually terrible for us –it makes sense to minimize one’s exposure to synthetic “nutrition.” (One could actually call this “dietary conservatism.”) Finally, over the next 10 years, look for Western nations and medical bureaucracies to begin revising what they’ve proclaimed, ex cathedra, about fat.
The paleo diet is an attempt to approximate a diet closer to the diet of our ancestors. Modern humans are partially domesticated animals with wild ancestors. Just as you’d try to feed a trained monkey what it would eat in the wild to improve it’s health and happiness in the zoo, it makes sense to feed people what they evolved to eat in the wild.
John Durant makes this point in his recent book, The Paleo Manifesto, and takes it a step further. The Paleo Manifesto covers the basic guidelines of the paleo diet in plain and sensible language, but it’s not another diet book and it’s not a cookbook. The Paleo Manifesto pushes a total lifestyle change. Durant isn’t just concerned with what you eat, but when you eat, how you exercise and how you work. The big idea is to bring all of this into better harmony with the lifeways we adapted to in our species’ first few million years on the planet.
However, John Durant is not the unabomber. He lives in New York City, and he’s not trying to get you to move to a cabin in the woods. He wants to help you live happier and healthier in the modern zoo. This is the mainstream appeal of The Paleo Manifesto, which is full of fun facts about fasting to beat jet lag, standing desks (I became a fast fan), the footwear industry, sunscreen, cancer, thermoregulation and sleep. It’s an easy, engaging read and a jumping off point for further thinking on how to use what is known about evolutionary biology to improve the way primal humans interact with modern technology and the demands of life in the 21st Century.
Durant is often called a caveman, but The Paleo Manifesto doesn’t argue for some ascetic retreat into ooga-booga primitivism. Durant looks forward with a reference to and some reverence for the past. In a recent presentation for Google, he called the paleo lifestyle “biohacking.”
The Paleo Manifesto is paleofuturism.
Durant’s paleofuturism complements Guillaume Faye’s subversive idea: archeofuturism.
Published in 1999 as a response to the conservatism and negative (anti-) tendencies of the Right. Faye wanted to create a positive vision of the future that corrected the foolishness of enforced egalitarianism and what is often called secular humanism — but isn’t truly human at all, because it rejects any realistic understanding of human nature in favor of feel-good blank slate fantasies.
Faye writes that “over the past 50,000 years, homo sapiens has changed very little, and archaic and pre-modern models of social organization have proven valid.” Instead of seeing man as an “asexual and isolated atom possessing universal and enduring pseudo-rights,” Faye believes that should see him holistically, as the Greeks did — as social animal who properly belongs to a human community.
Instead of rejecting technological development and yearning for a return to total primitivism, as many on the Right do, Faye wants us to embrace technological movement and human creativity, but balance it with a rational understanding of human nature and a respect for forms of social organization that have been natural to the human animal throughout its history.
According to Faye, when “egalitarian hallucinations [..] have been sunk by catastrophe, humanity will revert to its archaic forms, which are purely biological and human.” He lists the archaic forms as follows:
- the separation of gender roles
- transmission of ethnic and folk traditions
- visible and structuring social hierarchies
- the worship of ancestors
- rites and tests of initiation
- organic communities (family and folk)
- de-individualization of marriage (marriage as a concern of the community)
- prestige of the warrior caste
- inequality among social statuses (not implicit, but explicit and ideological)
- definitions of peoples and groups (tribalism vs. globalism)
While somewhat idiosyncratic in its preoccupations, this list overlaps with Donald Brown’s list of “human universals.”
Faye tells us we should dream of the future and plan for the future, but temper this futurism with archaism, which he defines not as backward-looking nostalgia, but an understanding of and respect for the “founding impulses” of human social organization.
Using what is known about evolutionary psychology and tried forms of human social organization to inform humanity’s march into the future corrects the built-in mistake of modern life — which is truly driven by greedy commercialism and merely rationalized and pseudo-sacralized by “progressive” neophilia. In what passes for “social science” today, there is a tendency to throw out any traditional idea about human nature which cannot immediately be explained by scientific inquiry — some quick “study,” or the current perception of the barely understood brain — in favor of some theoretical form of social organization completely untried and unknown to our species. It was from the abstract academic fancies of a few, not collective human experience or wisdom, that the disastrous and inhuman experiment of feminism and the absurdity of “diversity is strength” have been imposed.
Together, Faye’s Archeofuturism and Durant’s Paleo Manifesto offer a total, positive approach to the future that is informed and guided by what is known about the human animal, both physically and socially. The details of either book can be debated and elaborated on, but the big, combined idea of looking to human evolutionary and social history as we envision the future is a philosophical starting point that could be a useful for many different kinds of people who find themselves increasingly wary of the social, psychological and physiological costs of runaway global commercialism and commercially driven, abstract notions of human “progress.”
Source: http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2013/11/paleofuturism-for-the-man-archeofuturism-for-the-people/
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27 comments
Great reviews, and (probably) great books too.
I wonder if you read Nassim Taleb’s books. He is a non-White (although probably has a healthy dose of white ancestors), and quite a bit anti-White (at least very strongly pro-open borders, which very much contradicts the rest of his philosophy), but I think his writings contain a lot of things useful for us. We can use what is good for us, and throw out the rest.
Anyway, he has all the basic ideas: we don’t need much of modernity, we don’t need academics telling us how to live, we should use methods that have withstood the test of time, and be wary of anything new. All else equal, an older solution is always safer than a new one, which can turn out to be wrong. Of course he has many other ideas, which I find useful. (And as already mentioned, some stupid or useless ideas, which is inevitable.)
Jack,
You’ve mentioned the paleo diet before (and general low carb, high saturated fat eating). So you might be familiar with the book The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson (of MarksDailyApple.com, a huge paleo site).
I did a thorough skimming through ‘The Paleo Manifesto’, and it didn’t seem to offer anything that wasn’t already written about in ‘The Primal Blueprint’. In particular, both books go beyond the dietary aspect of paleo and discuss exercise, sleep patterns, and overall lifestyle rhythms.
Not only did ‘The Paleo Manifesto’ just repeat shit that’s been popular and published already….but it’s clear why the author is getting so much press: excessive and repeated cocksucking of Jews in the book. He regularly celebrates Jews, repeatedly talks of the Holocaust with by-the-numbers reverence and credulity, and even has a “Hitler was a Vegetarian!” sidebar, with the implication that if Germans do X, Y, or Z, then all those things are evil.
Strange that Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson, Loren Cordain, Tom Naughton, and other great researchers and advocates of paleo are ignored or mocked by the mainstream media, whereas a man willing to prostrate himself before Jews suddenly gets play (not much, but more than anybody else, that’s for sure).
Even still, it is fantastic to see the growth of the paleo diet. (Basically: cut grains and sugar from your diet as much as you reasonably can, have all the meats, saturated fats, and veggies you want, and avoid seed oils like vegetable, soybean, corn oil, etc., like the plague.) It has been an absolute Godsend for me and my dad both (I swear to God that I would take my dad, now in his sixties, over most bloated thirty-somethings in a fight. He’s THAT healthy now.)
David Duke also regularly promotes the paleo diet, and MarksDailyApple.com in particular. I could go on and on, talking about the athletes who’ve had miraculous late-career resurgences on it (like baseball player David Ortiz), about how all androgens like testosterone and HGH are based off of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat, and how the paleo diet will make infertile and asexual people suddenly virile and fertile. But once you get talking about how miraculous the paleo diet is, it’s difficult to stop, so I’ll cut short now.
Here is a great testimonial which totally corresponds to my personal experience: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/complete-recovery-within-a-week/#more-11416
In today’s world, it’s probably unintentional; authors know Who to laud, and no one, Jew or goy, in publishing would even notice enough to say, like Harvey Korman in Blazing Saddles, “too Jewish.”
The idea that the Levitical laws were “wise hygienic provisions” is a typical bit of goyishe philosemitism, which requires one to ignore many facts, such as
1. It is a priestly code imposed on the people after the Exile, i.e, centuries after the supposed desert wandering, which, btw, never happened anyway.
2. One needs to cherry-pick ones examples, ignoring dozens of decidedly un-hygienic instructions, such as the blood-dousing “cure” for leprosy. And imagine how “hygienic” the Temple must have been , filled all day with buring fat on the altars?
3. The real origins of these practices are quite different: “kosher” slaughter is animal sacrifice, for example. The proscription of pork arises from it being sacred to Caananite goddess cults, etc. There is a religious origin and purpose, not hygienic, as the Rabbis would be quick to point out. Unless they want you to believe otherwise… goys!
His lauding of circumcision appropriately combines all these points. It originates in a homosexual Caananite ritual, which the Rabbis were unable to entirely stamp out and so absorbed into the law (like pagan rites in Christianity). This, and its light years away from “hygiene,” is show by the ACTUAL Orthodox ritual, in which the Rabbi sucks the blood from the tip.
This, of course, is kept secret from the goyim who delight imposing the rite on themselves; except when the children start dying from contact with the herpes-mfested lips of the filthy rabbis, as happened recently in NYC. Some hygiene!
As with blacks, one’s admiration is inverse to ones experience. Anyone who thinks tribal Hebrews were especially hygienic has never sat next to a Hasid on the NYC subway.
What Rabbi would do this to an unclean goy child?
I’ll admit most of the material wasn’t new to me, because I’ve already read a few books on paleo. I think he was in the right place at the right time to cash in on something that was ready to go mainstream, so he wrote an engaging, mainstream book about it. It’s a better way of eating, so if it goes mainstream, that’s fine. It’s a good intro book for paleo newbies.
I did notice it was a bit gratuitous on praising ze Jews.
FWIW, I’ve also been following this guy on Twitter for a year or so, and he’s not afraid to be a little politically incorrect — especially to radical feminists. He’s also ruthless with vegetarians. He and I ave exchanged a few emails/messages, and he’s read my book, so he’s also not afraid to be associated with me. I like that about him.
John Durant is occasionally commenting on the West Hunter blog (of Cochran and Harpending), so probably he knows something about human biodiversity. The West Hunter crowd are no white nationalists (and they are usually Judeophile), but they are not politically correct, so they don’t get repulsed by white nationalists or any other politically incorrect people. Cochran just thinks Jews are smarter and that’s end of the story of why they dominate. He seems to notice but not care for the Jewish pattern of pushing for the decay of Western societies. But he is at least open about why he thinks someone like Richard Perle would advocate for a war in the Middle East, he is also strongly against nonwhite immigration (although possibly not much against East Asian or Jewish immigration), he is also for eugenics, so he is already better than all of American or Western European mainstream life. (His commenters could be to the left or to the right of him.)
Re The Paleo Manifesto. Relatively few people are capable of following a way of eating just because there is plenty of scientific evidence that it’s “good” for them. Every diet has its defenders and critics. The fact is that a viable fraction of North Amerikans have cravings for chocolate, coffee, sugar, wheat products, alcohol, etc. that they will kill for.
Further, I’ve yet to encounter or hear about a person whose health greatly improved through following a specific diet (for example, paleo/primal; vegan; raw; starchy lowfat; or any other) who could stick with it and remain healthy for many years. They end up with health issues again, not having grasped that these regimens are healing diets, not “forever” diets. We have to reassess things from time to time and maybe make some changes that go against our previous ideologies. What you eat is only a part of the picture, anyway.
By the way, we can’t as an entire population go back to how our ancestors ate and lived, or at least I doubt it. Our bodies have evolved over the past 10,000 years. On the other hand, it’s interesting to note that V. Stefansson apparently ate nothing but unsalted frozen and boiled fish when he lived with the Eskimos and did just fine. Doeesn’t mean I could do it. Grist for the mill.
Stronza,
You write that, ” I’ve yet to encounter or hear about a person whose health greatly improved through following a specific diet (for example, paleo/primal; vegan; raw; starchy lowfat; or any other) who could stick with it and remain healthy for many years.”
Hello, my name is David. Now you have met somebody. I’ve been on the paleo diet since the summer of 2011, along with my dad. In that time, I’ve met and known of hundreds of other people online who are on it, too. You can stop by the nearest CrossFit (where they strongly advocate the paleo diet) and shake hands with hundreds of others.
Even if people WEREN’T able to break addictions to grains and processed foods….that’s no reason to stop trying, any more than somebody addicted to alcohol should just not even bother trying to stay sober.
I think that paleo diet is fundamentally distinct from other diets (which people go off and on regularly) because (a) it’s usually pretty flexible, depending upon how committed the person is to it (I’m pretty loosey-goosey relative to many others) and (b) it’s the only diet that says, “You want a breakfast with a plate full of bacon and a gigantic egg and Swiss cheese omelet? Run, don’t walk, to your nearest kitchen! That’s great for you!”
It works. It’s just that simple. Before espousing more rote skepticism and criticism of it, take a while to read The Primal Blueprint or The Paleo Manifesto. You can also Torrent great documentaries like Fat Head or In Search of the Perfect Human Diet.
It’s funny because I find the ideas of intelligent design very fascinating, and 100% of the time when I speak (or write) about it with somebody, the responses are always the exact same as they are with the paleo diet: (a) they don’t grasp the ideas at a basic level, (b) their criticisms are bogus and shallow, (c) their criticisms are those espoused by the mainstream media and pop “skeptic” like Skeptic Magazine. Even at sites like 9/11 Truth sites or WN sites or whatever, many people are still locked into the notion of “consensus science” (an oxymoron) and general trust for mainstream media portrayal of things. People at 9/11 Truth sites will basically say, “Well, sure, the media can lie to us about the cold blooded murder of 3,000 people on national television as we’re watching it….but they would NEVER lie to us about food [or whatever].” There’s just a contradiction in their worldview. The mainstream media is deadly. They lie about everything.
It would be great if people would just fucking learn about things before criticizing and dismissing them.
I meant, is there anyone around (not of aboriginal/stoneage ethnicity, who are naturally designed to eat paleo-style) who can stick with this for 10, 15, 20, 30 years without getting serious cravings for all or any aspects of the previous “civilized” diet.
I see all of the unusual diets I mentioned as being balancing-type diets; they are compensating for the deficiencies or excesses of a previous way of eating, that is all, and that is why they produce reduction or elimination of symptoms, sometimes serious diseases also. I doubt that anyone of our racial background can hack any of these diets for decades. Cravings for “bad” things will surface once again, and along with giving in to the cravings come the rationalizations, like John Robbins [look him up if you don’t know who he is] telling us how good chocolate is for us, when it’s not the chocolate, I suspect it’s all the sugar that it comes packaged with that he actually craves, along with that fine red wine. Or the rationalizations for alcohol consumption by paleo eaters. I see this all the time with enthusiastic followers of this or that fabulous curative diet. Haven’t you heard of “orthorexia”?
Me, dietarily, every day is A New Day. I just eat what I want, and I don’t attribute every thing that is wrong with me to having eaten something “bad”. Don’t know about you, but I’m a tad more complicated than a plant that’s given certain nutrients, then Bob’s yer uncle, what a great crop you’ve got!
Re “consensus science”. You might find this relevant: http://www.amerika.org/politics/liberals-claim-gun-rights-are-racist/
Got nothing against Intelligent Design. It’s no stupider than some theories of evolution. The latter is actually less believable but either way nothing is provable.
Stranza,
You wrote, “I meant, is there anyone around (not of aboriginal/stoneage ethnicity, who are naturally designed to eat paleo-style) who can stick with this for 10, 15, 20, 30 years without getting serious cravings for all or any aspects of the previous “civilized” diet.”
This is setting up countless arbitrary (and some impossible) barriers that, if conceded, would mean that everybody should subsist on shit American food.
Do most paleo people get cravings for Mountain Dew, Doritos, and Twinkies? Probably. If you think that cravings for unhealthy things means that the healthy alternatives are bad or impractical, then by that logic crack cocaine, perverted sex, junk food, and every other indulgence is fine. But if “cravings” for candy nullifies paleo in your mind, then you win right here.
You then asked if there’s anybody of non-black descent who’s been on the paleo diet for….how many years? You listed four different time benchmarks that must be met before you’ll say that the paleo diet is healthy. These clearly arbitrary figures on an already arbitrary standard (people’s resistance to Twinkies) make the point seem stupid. Also, the paleo diet has only been around for maybe 20 years (and only been gaining in popularity in the past five or so). Still, people like Loren Cordain (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52A3ayfxfTs) has been on it (or less defined forms of it) for many years. Robb Wolf has been on it it for perhaps 15 years (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PpuIKTg6QE).
Personally, I find the paleo diet liberating and additive rather than reductive, the way people usually perceive diets. This is because I was suddenly free to have juicy bacon cheeseburgers (sans bun), good thick, whole milk (rather than the repulsive skim milk I’d previously belived was healthy), almonds and nuts drenched in coconut oil and covered with salt, and many other delicious, energizing foods that I believed would kill me before. I have close to a pack of bacon per day….and I am way more lean and spry than I was back when I was eating typical American shit. Saturated fats and dietary cholesterol are great.
The number of MMA fighters, athletes, and celebrities who deeply laud the paleo diet (though not promoted by the media the way “vegan” celebrities are) are numerous. These include Ronda Rousey, Aaron Rodgers, Kobe Bryant, and many others.
Many people might not know this, but levels of testosterone and other androgens – as well as sperm quality – has dropped dramatically in the past few decades (as meat consumption has also dropped, likely a strong factor). Newsweek had a blurb article in 2006 called, “Your Dad Had More Testosterone Than You”, noting an endocrinology journal’s thorough study showing drops in testosterone. (And, again, it’s not JUST testosterone, but all hormones, as saturated fat and dietary cholesterol are the base molecules for them, and people have replaced those with grains and sugar.) These results have been verified in countless other articles.
Here’s a great blog post about how a guy doubled his testosterone very quickly on the paleo diet (although he does not call it that)
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/01/18/how-to-increase-testosterone-naturally/
For White Nationalists, consider that not only are sex hormones plummeting with shitty American diets….but sperm quality has decayed so much that the NIH has to repeatedly lower the standards for what’s considered healthy sperm counts. Here’s a chilling article about this phenomenon in Russia: http://rt.com/news/mutation-men-russia-science-531/
How are whites going to survive if they have no sex hormones, and their sperm quality is shit? (Incidentally, women are experiencing huge problems, too, including an epidemic of “Premature Ovarian Failure” – basically, they’re reaching menopause at younger and younger ages. )
For healthy hormones, body composition, mental clarity, and everything else, I highly recommend the lifestyle and diet guidelines discussed in ‘The Paleo Manifesto’. As I said before, you can also watch free documentaries like ‘Fat Head’, or read related books on the subject. There’s tons of great material.
—–
I liked the article deriding “consensus science”. Here’s one for you, from the late, great Michael Crichton: “I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
—–
Separately: Are the Counter-Currents pages showing up as eternally “loading” in other people’s browsers? The little cycling graphic never stops spinning, and so I always feel like something is wrong.
“Are the Counter-Currents pages showing up as eternally ‘loading’ in other people’s browsers? The little cycling graphic never stops spinning, and so I always feel like something is wrong.”
I haven’t noticed this particular problem on my computer. But when viewing pages at Counter-Currents using Firefox on my computer, I’ve noticed that if I left-click on the “Go back one page” button in the browser, it doesn’t go back one page, and if I right-click on it to see the history of pages viewed, the page I am currently viewing is listed three times, even if I’ve viewed it only once during the browsing session. I haven’t encountered this glitch with other websites.
I think the key is to look at it as a way of eating, not a “diet.” It’s not a religion.
I’ve eaten paleo off and on for the past several years. I remember trying it in 2002 when there were just a couple of low tech web sites about it — complete with caveman .gifs.
I’m always working out and tweaking my training/diet in some direction or other. After several years, I will say that I think, overall, keeping the basic guidelines of paleo (not the fanatical ones) leads to better health and fitness.
Bread and chocolate and pasta and BEER are delicious, and I feel like having some, I do. But a high fat, high protein diet is better, and I generally avoid bread, sugar and pasta.
What junk food people will kill for isn’t really my concern. People will kill to watch football or the Oscars, too.
The best paleo lifestyle/diet book I’ve read to date is http://www.amazon.com/It-Starts-Food-Discover-Unexpected/dp/1936608898.
The Primal blueprint definitely “works”. I myself never had any problems with weight gain or building muscle as an ecto-mesomorph, but evidently had some level of gluten intolerance given that my acne, brain fog, and Aspergers-like symptoms more or less evaporated in less than a year after following that diet. I now have reintegrated low-gluten grains like whole grain rye and spelt, even some beer, as well as resuming milk consumption and notice no negative symptoms until I start eating high-gluten wheat. So as you said, Stronza, I think all variations of the Paleo diet are best handled as healing diets.
Additionally, based on the patterns I’ve observed I think the degree to which one benefits from following these diets is heavily dependent not just on one’s race, but “subrace” if you will. Endomorphs should probably eliminate grains entirely and stick to low-carb foods in general. Mesomorphs should lay off the grains as well but can eat more carbs in the form of root vegetables etc, especially if your really active (pealo diet for athletes). Ectomorphs ( those who depending on their geographical origin, have either significant agriculturalist ancestry dating back to the neolithic, or pastoralist/herder-warrior ancestry from the bronze age) can eat significantly more grains, with the latter group limited to mostly rye and the lowest gluten grains, as well as plenty of dairy.
Im no nutritionist but this just seems to be the overall, more less obvious, pattern.
So I think finding some middle of the road diet between the paleo diet and the diet of your great grandparents is the golden mean to be attained to.
I’d generally agree with your somatotype advice as a rough guide.
It is important to keep in mind that there was a wide vareity of diets practiced by primitive mankind probably corresponding both to environmental niche and to cultural temperament. The eskimos had a practically meat based diet while other groups ate the stuff only rarely and survived on roots and berries.
As a practically lifelong vegetarian I have to oppose the aspect of this diet that glorifies meat eating as being callous and inhumane, especially in this dark age when sick factory farming methods are standard.
After some experimentation I have found that a diet based on raw vegetables with lots of olive oil and and avocados, produces the most mental and physical energy.
A huge number of authorities in our intellectual tradition have endorsed vegetarianism; Wagner, Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, early Nietzche, to name a few. It would be sad to abandon this all in the name of a fad diet.
I’m on a “see diet” myself with lots of comfort food so I can keep calm at work but you made a good point with in this dark age when sick factory farming methods are standard in that we don’t really realize what we are eating: and “meat” today is not the meat our ancestors ate. Not to mention the additives – but they really are difficult to avoid.
Vegetarians are almost never vegetarians for health reasons alone, so any arguments about why we should become vegetarians are motivated by concerns aside from what makes humans stronger and faster and healthier.
The author addresses the factory farming issue, which he also finds troublesome, but again, that has absolutely nothing (or very little, depending on the details) to do with health or fitness.
I think everybody should read this: “The Paleo Diet Is Uncivilized (And Unhealthy and Untrue)”:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2012nl/jun/paleo2.htm
Best regards
The Nationalist vegan
This website explores problems associated with vegetarian/vegan diets.
http://www.beyondveg.com/cat/frank-talk/index.shtml
Could somebody here be so good as to comment on why they think some people are exposed to information on the healthfulness of a paleo diet, need to balance hormones & lose fat, yet they simply cannot stick with it after trying it? Why others see factory farming either in person or on video, feel sick for the suffering of the animals, yet can’t stop eating these products? Why they bloody well know what the standard chemical-laced, oily, floury, sugary western diet is doing to them, yet they just keep on eating this way till they collapse?
We aren’t just a bunch of machines. You have to first be attracted to the kinds of foods that are healthy for you, that you love eating and that you love preparing/cooking. That support you mentally and physically. That don’t offend your values. That you don’t have to force yourself to eat day after day. Food that’s so right for you that you don’t feel you have to defend or argue about it, ever.
As a general principle, I’d say that just because various populations ate in a certain way for countless years doesn’t automatically mean that is what was best for them. They had to make do with what was there. We are probably the only people anywhere who have all this choice and can actually argue about food. Mind you, I don’t think this is going to last.
The forces of entropy are going to constantly compel people toward degrading and destructive acts. Eating junk food is one of the foremost of these destructive acts. Now that civilization has established techniques to mass produce food cheaply, and to make foods which are supercharged versions of foods in nature (15 grams of sugar in an apple becomes 150 grams of high fructose corn syrup in a Coke bottle), the struggle for healthy eating will always exist. There are only two scenarios whereby people will not be tempted to eat junk food: (a) some sort of food totalitarianism where the government decides what and how much people eat, and (b) a total ‘Mad Max’ style collapse in civilization where supply chains and economic incentives are broken.
So, that is my answer to the question of why people are tempted by junk food: because it exists, and it will now exist for all time.
The idea of the “paleo” diet is, obviously, not to exactly replicate one particular ancient people’s diet. Diets obviously varied greatly, depending on the climate, proximity to the ocean, longitude, and epochal shifts in climate like the Ice Age. The idea instead stems from the observation that archaeological evidence strongly indicated that individuals were healthier before the agricultural revolution. Therefore, if people eschew foods from before after the agricultural revolution, they will exhibit the better health found in the archaeological studies.
The usefulness of this approach to diet has been greatly intensified in the past fifty years because modern grains have been interbred and otherwise been synthetically modified to such an extent that they’re far worse than the wheat and corn our grandparents ate (which, again, were sub-optimal as a protein source to begin with), and because all of the modern processed foods, specifically seed oils and added sugar, are absolute hell on our glands, digestive systems, and immune systems. (The book ‘Wheat Belly’ is a great description of the former phenomenon. Its author was interviewed by David Duke on his radio program. You can find the interview here: http://www.renseradioarchives.com/dduke/. It is on the 4-25-12 installment.)
Psychologically, I have emphatically found the paleo/Primal diet and lifestyle liberating, not stifling. I was first turned on to it after watching ‘Fat Head’ where the guy making the documentary is having bacon, eggs, berries covered in thick cream, cheese. I thought, “That’s healthy!” It was exciting to me to now be able to eat these things, whereas in the past I’d thought a cheeseburger and glass of whole milk would kill me.
Of course….it’s not absolute. There are some post-agricultural foods that are healthy (Robb Wolf cites olive oil as the prime example), and, anyway, people are going to digress from it from time to time. Personally, once a week or so, I’ll get some Mountain Dew, popcorn, and candy, and pig out while watching a movie or playing a video game. (But even here, I’m now more educated: I pop my own popcorn and slather it with grass fed butter and iodized salt. For candy, I’ll have Raisnets or dark chocolate or something like that rather than Sour Patch Kids.) If there is a big social function where I’ll want to pig out, I’ll make sure to fast for 24+ hours afterward, and just throw caution to the wind.
I’m sure you’re not too interested in my personal eating habits, so I won’t carry on, but the point I’m making is to psychologically understand that the paleo/Primal diet and lifestyle is as much liberating as it is restricting. For me, even moreso, since I love fatty foods.
The site MarksDailyApple.com posts testimonials every Friday from people who’ve had big health changes. I encourage you to skim through them and read the accounts (and look at the photos!) of these people: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/category/success-story-summaries/#axzz2jr2Qit5r
One other note:
The modern diet is premised off of the “lipid hypothesis”, which was popularized (and perhaps originated in modern form) by fraudster Ancel Keyes….who looks like a Jew, and I believe is a Jew, and I suspect promoted the high carb, low fat phenomenon to sterilize whites. That’s a suspicion. (Can Andrew Hamilton do his investigation and find out if Ancel Keyes was a Jew?)
This was the salvo shot in the Jews’ war on fat, continuing with New York Times’ Jewess cooking expert, Jane Brody, who published a bestseller with a title like, “Cooking the Low Fat Way” or some shit in the 1950’s, which basically said avoid fats (and have no hormones!) and get your grains (and wreck your glands!) to trusting whites who followed along. Now, look at Americans and whites: bloated, prematurely aged (women are reaching menopause younger and younger), impotent, chronically ill and aching.
Paleo dieters are like marxists who in a primal good intention to get rid of capitalism, they kill off the whole of civilisation. Dairy products, bread, cheese, all those tradition that stifled
our civilisation for over 8.000 years at least (if not the double of this figure).
Nordics are a variety of CroMagnons that emerged from no one knows for sure where or how nor when. But the Viking myth of the origin of this world was through a sacred cow and the cow’s milk.
Europeans who wish to go back to cavemen diet of their ancestors eating kiwis shrimp coconut oil & brazilian nuts are just that… nuts.
Or follow the exemple of very healthy 60year specimen who live in hawaii , surf all day and are mega rich like Mark Sisson : everyone would be healthy in those conditions.
Off course 90% of the message of paleo is wholesome and vegetarianism is anti-life (>Lierre >Keith) as the bowels of Hitler badly experienced.
But we should not shove dairy products nor our daily bread down the drain, and our husbadnry landscapes our professions our traditions with it to go and live like apeman aborginals and abandon all that made up and permitted us to create our civilisation.
Bread and grains made us able to build cities with bare hands. Meat does not fuel enough to build cathedrals. But if you do not do any hard labour, indeed grain energy surplus is bad for you.
Oh and by the way : all women ever desired or crafted in an image by cro magnon, yes all the Venuses we have found from 40.000 to 15.000 BC are all heavy heavy overweight.
On the so called paleo diet. They were huge fat women.
The image Mark Sisson depict of a healthy lean couple of lean man and lean muscular woman
hunter gathering is pure BS :
http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/cro-magnon-clothing-a-venus-not-in-furs/
I’m amused by all the anti-Paleo naysayers on this thread. Maybe Paleo is suitable only for aggressive, creative, elite Alpha types, and the Standard American Diet (SAD)/vegetarianism is for the Beta slave class? Just a thought.
Big mistake to attribute everything to diet, at least in modern times. I’d suggest that esp. over the past few generations we are a mighty toxic bunch, mainly caused by the depredations of science and medicine, especially on the weak and vulnerable developing child.
Please trouble yourselves to find out how many times that little baby arm is poked in the name of “disease prevention” with vaccines containing these things:
This is from official medical sources, and they admit these substances are there yet claim they don’t harm babies or at least most are left unscathed. Sure.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/112/6/1394.full
If you can’t consume the food of our ancestors (we are omnivores, by the way, not obligate carnivores or vegetarians) then you are deeply sick inside. The reaction to the food (excess/deficient hormones, too fat, too this, too that) is likely only a manifestation of a deep disease process. And childhood vaccinations are only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more.
Maybe someone could tell me how my parents, born into poor and insanitary homes, where they were actually birthed, were able to survive to old age without any of these benefits. And my grandparents.
Glad you mentioned “forces of entropy”, David. Our European ancestors (and all other peoples, too) understood this, and developed forms of medicine that did a minimum of, if any, harm to deal with this fact of life. The Eclectic style of medicine, developed in 19th century USA, is one example, which built on the wisdom of the past. But in any case it’s too bad that so many of us are so far gone that we think we have to eat like cavemen for the rest of our lives (with regular furtive inputs of beer & sugar) or gnaw on all-raw like livestock.
How about preventing such degeneration in the first place?
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