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The Caveman Diet

Let's face it, America's weight problem is out of control. A summer stroll down any airport corridor reveals a family of five resembling spin dryers in easy-fit clothes. Youngsters are showing diabetes at 15 and obesity is a national health issue. Book stores feature hundreds of diet books facing their enemy cook books across the aisle. Virtually everyone is on a diet and people who still dare to produce dinner parties for their friends have to negotiate a perilous rapids of choice of foods which are certifiably low-cal, low-salt, low-chol, low-fat and low-whatever.

People go to their doctors for blood tests for cholesterol and triglycerides with the grave fear appropriate to confession -- Sin at Table will be revealed when the wizard inspects our entrails. Choosing food has become almost metaphysical and certainly moral, not simply physical and sensual. Surely something fundamental is involved, not just greed.

There is, and one burgeoning argument about what it is is the agricultural revolution. Step back for a moment. We evolved as hunters and gatherers. A graduate student in my Rutgers department, Matt Sponheimer, published an article in Nature in l999 showing from the micro-analysis of wear on fossil teeth that our ancestors were eating meat over 2.5 million years ago. We mainly ate meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. We have to assume our physiology evolved in association with this diet. The balanced diet for our species was what we could acquire then, not what the government and doctors tell us to eat now.

We were likely hungry nearly all the time. When we had to reduce our intake of food our metabolism slowed to compensate. We didn't run after dinner for exercise, we ran before dinner -- for dinner itself. Only about 10,000 years ago did we learn how to herd animals, grow grains, and get to sit around.

Within medicine and anthropology there has been a controversy brewing for years about the possible unhealthiness of the diet made possible -- and even necessary given our crowded planet -- by agriculture. The most popular expression of sharp wariness about particular agricultural products was the 1972 book, "Diet Revolution," in which Robert Akins argued that eating carbohydrates, especially grains -- which are cheap -- made people hungry so they ate more and burgeoned. A set of endocrinological events in the body, he argued, cause the favorite foods of Current Authorities -- bread, pasta, rice, for example -- to cause hunger and overeating. Instead, they were told to eat food containing more-satisfying animal fats, including daily bacon and eggs, bacon cheeseburgers, butter sauces, no flour and hardly any fruit. The medical and nutritional establishments found this intolerable and said so very loudly. Thereafter cholesterol levels became as important personal scores as IQ and to some as net worth.

In 1987, three members of the Emory University faculty, Boyd Eaton, Mel Konner, and Marjorie Shostak, published "The Paleolithic Prescription" which analyzed what our ancestors ate (and we are still our ancestors physiologically) and recommended an appropriate modern diet which differed from the ideal food pyramid promoted by the Department of Agriculture. But there was an important difference from the Atkins-style claim, which was that they ate meat which was lower in fat than domestic animals -- grain-fed beef (grain again) may have 36% fat content while grass-fed has about 18% and wildfowl and venison about 3%-4%, like most fish. They had no salt-cured bacon. They had no easy sugar which did not emerge until relatively recently.

Now you can buy a wheelbarrow of sugar for a tenner and kids drink more soft drinks than water. Schools are bribed by companies to install their machines in corridors about which there is finally the beginning of a parental outcry (of course in California first), and it would not surprise me if in 10 to 15 years soda machines have the same status in schools as cigarette machines now have in universities.

Sixteen months ago, science writer Gary Taubes published a lengthy essay in Science which identified the quandary of scientists confronting the fact that a Draconian vegetarian-prone diet did not induce longer life. The Wall Street Journal on June 13 published a considerable critique of Agriculture's Food Pyramid and on Sunday Mr. Taubes published another article on the same theme in the New York Times Magazine. The controversy is outed. There will be much talk at dinner and with doctors from here on in. What to do?

The gift of this controversy is to attend to a new form of environmentalism -- not what's outside of us and smells fine but what gets put inside of us which we are evolutionarily equipped to digest to make us healthy not fat and hungry. This means we have to understand ourselves as citizens of the paleolithic, and eat and exercise appropriately.

Of course moderation is an easy and succinct answer -- don't ever ever order the Value Meal. For what it's worth, I've found a paleolithic diet enjoyable and doable even though I live in Manhattan, which has, especially at lunch, some of the world's best food at the lowest prices.

Two baconburgers a day is insane but two burgers a week is plausible. The dining table should not be a tense battlefield but a scene of shared pleasure because we are a food-sharing and food-enjoying omnivorous species. So lighten up, eat the food we're designed to eat, and you'll lighten up too. I'll have a steak sandwich -- and hold the bread, please.

Mr. Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, is author of "The Decline of Males" (Golden Books, 1999).

Updated July 9, 2002