Paleo

Tried a new restaurant for lunch today, Dicks Primal Burger opened in the neighborhood a couple weeks ago and we hadn't had a burger place in the area for awhile so I wanted to check it out.

It's good! They are Paleo friendly, and I'll come back to that in a bit, but the food is really quite nice, I had a bbq bacon cheeseburger and was quite impressed, they cook to your preference of doneness, medium is the default, and the patty is actually very flavorful, and manages to be noticed even through the toppings, which are also good. The fries were good, they fry them in rice bran oil, which I didn't even know was a thing, but they are the balance of crispness without being crunchy, I'll be going back for sure.

So, Paleo, for those unaware the Paleo diet is an attempt to reconstruct the diet eaten by our Paleolithic ancestors, there are many variations of the diet, but essentially they cut out as much processed food as possible, while emphasizing meat and vegetables prepared with minimal interference. I don't really have a problem with the diet itself, although as with any health fad, there are many practitioners who are insufferable, but it does bring up the related topic of how we regard the habits of our ancestors as somehow better and more healthy than our current practices.

I have issues with this, our best guess at the average age of our pre-civilization ancestors is somewhere in the late twenties, they would sleep in the open or in rough shelters and caves, tooth care was unknown, as was anything related to germ theory, they ate what they did because that is what they could eat, and many died or were crippled by diseases picked up from improperly cooked food.

This was the state of things basically up until the 19th century or so pretty much the world over, oh, we managed to add another decade or so to the median lifespan, but cities and industry brought there own health issues and we still didn't eat all that great, and again, the idea that tiny creatures we couldn't see with the naked eye caused disease was a pretty out there concept, if it was even thought of at all. Sure we picked up some ideas, we figured out early in civilization that water tended to make us sick, so alcohol was drunk a lot by those concerned with it, called "small beer" in England, it was apparently pretty vile but you could drink it, not get too drunk, and not die of dysentery. However, few people managed to figure out that a lot of those illnesses were because we crapped in our water source or that boiling water would accomplish the same thing usually.

The point it, the entirety of human history has been a movement away from our Paleolithic ancestors, we evolved knowing that nature has it out for us and wanted no part of it.

Today we life to almost 80 years on average and our quality of life during those years is inconceivably higher than anyone of previous generations can imagine, there is a school of thought that says the reason we are seeing more cancer and related diseases these days is not because humans never caught it before, but we died of other things before cancer got a chance to do anything.

Am I saying that everything about society and diet today is superior in every way than it has been before, not... really, I mean, our ancestors never imagined a Three Musketeers bar, which contains basically nothing that won't hurt you in some way, but it sure is tastier.

I am not ragging on the Paleo diet here by the way, it appears to get the correct amount of nutrients to you, and there is nothing wrong with having a limited diet of foods prepared well, but the reason the diet works is not because it is what we ate back in the day, it is because it doesn't kill you quite like food used to.

And also because it cuts out the Three Musketeers, that certainly helps too.