The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [3]
The Internet, Web sites, blogs, cell phones, and other various types of electronic wizardry have transformed our world within a mere decade or less. The electronic transmission of news and information and practical data to improve our lives, our financial situations, and our health has become humankind’s universal language. Anyone in the world who has access to either a computer or a cell phone can immediately connect with anyone else who has the same technology. We now can and do talk to one another in unprecedented numbers—by the billions. A local event can instantaneously become a worldwide happening. Today what your next-door neighbor knows is available not only to you and your close friends, but literally to the world.
With such vast and nearly total information connectiveness, a subtle but crucial upshot of this brave new electronic world has arisen. When someone comes up with an answer to a complex or even a simple problem that is correct and that works, it gains followers like a snowball rolling downhill. Such has been the case for The Paleo Diet. It simply works. In an earlier era, prior to the Web, when human networks were small and noninclusive, information flowed slowly or not at all. Accordingly, correct answers sometimes smoldered for years, decades, or longer before they became widely recognized and accepted. Fortunately, The Paleo Diet came of age at the same time that the Internet was being adopted globally.
Had I originally written about a diet—a lifetime way of eating—that didn’t work, The Paleo Diet would have simply faded into oblivion in the ensuing eight years since its publication. Yet it didn’t. My book continues to gain more and more supporters as people like you relate their personal health experiences with The Paleo Diet to one another via the largest and most comprehensive human network ever created: the Internet. If The Paleo Diet had caused you to gain weight, made you feel lethargic, raised your blood cholesterol, promoted ill health, and been impossible to follow, it would have fallen by the wayside like most other dietary schemes dreamed up by human beings. Yet it didn’t. In fact, The Paleo Diet movement continues to spread worldwide, thanks in part to the Web.
When people find correct answers to complex diet/health questions, they let their friends know, and thanks to the Internet, the momentum has accelerated. In the United States, the word “Paleo” has become part of mass culture, due in part to its popularity with the national CrossFit movement that is sweeping the country and recent coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other global media. The Paleo Diet has found wide acceptance not only with CrossFitters and athletes, but also with the medical and health professions, who have embraced it because of its wide-reaching therapeutic effects on metabolic syndrome diseases, autoimmune diseases, mental disorders, and beyond. In fact, there are very few chronic illnesses or diseases that do not respond favorably to our ancestral diet.
The novelty of The Paleo Diet is that a mortal human being like me didn’t create it. Rather, I—along with many other scientists, physicians, and anthropologists worldwide—simply uncovered what was already there: the diet to which our species is genetically adapted. This is the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the foods consumed by every human being on the planet until a mere 333 human generations ago, or about ten thousand years ago. Our ancestors