I have been hearing a lot about John Durant lately.  He was the star of a recent New York Times article on people following a "caveman" lifestyle while living in New York City.  Somehow he parlayed this fame into an appearance on The Colbert Report.  And I have no doubt that we will be seeing more of him in the near future.

It all started with The Paleo Diet.  But then, just like everything else, someone has to take it a little too far.  For example, others in the article describe hewing more closely to the caveman ethos.  Brothers Matthew and Andrew Sanocki advocate fasting, working out really hard, and then eating a large meal.  They contend that this most closely matches the caveman's lifestyle - you were hungry, you chased down your prey, and then you ate as much as possible.  They also advocate giving blood as often as possible, in order to mimic the conditions of blood loss which were most likely frequent back in the Pleistocene.

The paleo diet is fine and good, as far as it goes.  It advocates eating minimally processed fruits, vegetables, the occasional nuts, and meat.  Grains and other refined foods should be avoided.  It is similar to the raw food diet.  In either case, you will probably end up eating better than you are now.  In addition, the caveman trend incorporates exercise as a key part of the regime, which is also beneficial.

However, I get concerned when I see people like Durant who work in "online advertising" being polled as if they were experts.  In fact, Durant has apparently simply had the luck to run across a New York Times reporter, and to be willing to capitalize on this success.  Neither he nor anyone else profiled in the article have anything in their backgrounds which qualifies them, in the objective and empirical sense of the word, to advise the public on dietary matters.  Their only qualification is "having read some books that other people wrote."  

Furthermore, this all follows a somewhat alarming trend of mythologizing the earliest days of humanity.  According to this theory, we lived in a sort of evolutionary state of grace back then, half a million years ago.  We were apparently doing everything right, which is how we should do it now.

This is a pretty peculiar argument, if you think about it.  Just because we evolved under a specific set of circumstances, that does not make those circumstances ideal.  I hear a lot of people say exactly that, though.

How far can you take this argument?  Half a million years ago, we were happy to poop outdoors.  We lived in small groups, collections of family units, and probably went our entire lives without seeing anyone other than the 50 or so people we had grown up with.  We didn't know about things like germs, which is why so many of us died of diseases which are easily preventable.  Let's say you get some poop on your hands: in modern society, we wash it off with soap and water before making a sandwich.  It's really hot in Africa, but I don't see these guys moving to Arizona and turning off their air conditioning.

There are a lot of things that were true about life half a million years ago.  With so little actual scientific information in hand, how do you pick and choose between them?