....yeah, pretty much no diets are evidence-based, and the paleo people in particular are, er. Well. Er.
Look, I'm not an anthropologist, but I am an evolutionary biologist, and I can tell you that for one thing we know that humans have adapted, including adaptations geared towards digestion, since the advent of agriculture: lactose tolerance is particularly well known, but we also have evolutionary evidence of adaptation to high-starch/grain diets (and not just in us--in dogs, too!). See here this interesting piece about human evolution as a dialogue between the genetics of any given human population and the culture of that human population.
Now consider variation in the makeups of human cuisines across various cultures and socioeconomic strata: everything from almost purely carnivorous to purely vegan, incorporating meat, eggs, insects, fruit, plant pith, sap, leaves, milk, flowers, seeds, grains, tubers, weird shit like honey--if it is digestible, some human culture somewhere has worked out when and how to effectively eat it. The paleo people always have some extremely specific idea of what Early Man ate and figure that humans have just been in stasis this whole time, I guess, without adapting to their circumstances. But adapting to circumstances is what humans do.
Re: diets for weight loss, you might find this paper on the long-term efficacy of diets to be interesting; it should be freely available. The short answer is that in the long term, diets don't work, and if anything the stress can increase your set point of weight. Generally, if you can't get access to a peer reviewed article you want on your own, let me know and I'll host a downloadable version.
no subject
Look, I'm not an anthropologist, but I am an evolutionary biologist, and I can tell you that for one thing we know that humans have adapted, including adaptations geared towards digestion, since the advent of agriculture: lactose tolerance is particularly well known, but we also have evolutionary evidence of adaptation to high-starch/grain diets (and not just in us--in dogs, too!). See here this interesting piece about human evolution as a dialogue between the genetics of any given human population and the culture of that human population.
Now consider variation in the makeups of human cuisines across various cultures and socioeconomic strata: everything from almost purely carnivorous to purely vegan, incorporating meat, eggs, insects, fruit, plant pith, sap, leaves, milk, flowers, seeds, grains, tubers, weird shit like honey--if it is digestible, some human culture somewhere has worked out when and how to effectively eat it. The paleo people always have some extremely specific idea of what Early Man ate and figure that humans have just been in stasis this whole time, I guess, without adapting to their circumstances. But adapting to circumstances is what humans do.
Re: diets for weight loss, you might find this paper on the long-term efficacy of diets to be interesting; it should be freely available. The short answer is that in the long term, diets don't work, and if anything the stress can increase your set point of weight. Generally, if you can't get access to a peer reviewed article you want on your own, let me know and I'll host a downloadable version.