The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [2]
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ISBN 978-0-470-91302-4 (paper);
ISBN 978-1-118-00129-5 (ebk);
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ISBN 978-1-118-00131-8 (ebk)
To Lorrie, Kyle, Kevin, and Kenny for making it all worthwhile
Preface to the Revised Edition
The original version of The Paleo Diet first came into print in January 2002. After its initial release, my book gained popularity and sales were good for the next few years, but it did not achieve chart-topping levels and the national exposure for which I had hoped. Fast-forward eight years to 2010: The Paleo Diet has become one of America’s best-selling diet and health books.
This kind of sales history is almost unheard of in the publishing industry for successful diet books, which typically act like dwarf stars—they burn brightly at first and then fade away. Not so for The Paleo Diet, which started as a gentle glow and over the years has become hotter and hotter until now it is red hot. A diet book that once began as a ripple is now approaching tidal wave proportions.
Why? What is different about The Paleo Diet in 2010 compared to 2002? The material in the book has not radically changed, but the world has radically changed since 2002, particularly how we now communicate and inform one another about our lives, our daily experiences, and our reality. And herein is a clue to my book’s sustained and increasing popularity.
When I first started to write The Paleo Diet in 2000, the Internet was in its youthful throes (Google had been founded only two years earlier, in 1998), and most people still used telephones (not cell phones) to talk. The U.S. Postal Service remained healthy because Bill Gates’s foundational maxim “a personal computer in every household” had not yet taken firm hold, and snail mail reigned supreme. Then, “spam” simply meant canned meat. In the era of my book’s baptism, texting, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and most of the other Internet and electronic wizardry we now routinely take for granted still lay in the future. Then, people found out about the world through newspapers, radio, TV, and weekly news magazines. Now, except for the New York Times and a few other mainstays, daily newspapers have dried up to a trickle. Who wants to hear about outdated weekly news in paid-for magazines when you can get it for free and instantly from the Internet anytime you want? Like newspapers and magazines, radio and TV are not nearly as convenient or as timely as the Web—you can get Web versions of these media, anyway—so why bother with the real things?
When I wrote The Paleo Diet a decade ago, electronic interconnectedness