Link to Boyd Eaton's journal?
Forewarning: If you hate Eaton and/or Cordain, please skip to the warning and plea below.It was the New England Journal of Medicine and it's what started the Paleo diet movement (there were precursors, but AFAIK none of them used the terms "Paleolithic diet/nutrition" or "Paleo diet" or proposed a theory of evolutionary nutrition and biological discordance in a scientific manner before this article, though some came close--but people can suggest others if they like). This article inspired Loren Cordain and influenced Ray Audette (author of NeanderThin). Audette influenced the Beyondveg.com folks and semi-popularized the movement, then Cordain's first book (The Paleo Diet) got the first substantial press and expanded the movement further, creating a small niche of the diet world. The movement is still mostly below-the-radar in the popular media and wider diet circles, but it is increasingly influential in the scientific community, generating more and more citations and inspiring an accumulating mountain of research and debate.
The abstract is no longer available online, so here it is:
Eaton, S. Boyd, and Konner, Melvin (1985)
"Paleolithic nutrition: a consideration of its nature and current implications." The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 312, no. 5 (Jan. 31, 1985), pp. 283-289.
Abstract: A detailed literature survey reviews and discusses nutritional aspects of the diets of historical paleolithic societies and their nutritional adequacy in light of current nutritional knowledge. Topics include the evaluation of food consumption habits, ranging from hominids (about 24 to 5 million years ago), through the appearance of archaic homo sapiens (about 400,000 years ago), to the twentieth century; dietary habits of recent hunter-gatherer societies with respect to meat and vegetable consumption; the probable nutrient intakes of paleolithic humans for specific nutrients (energy; fat and fatty acids; cholesterol; sodium and potassium; calcium; ascorbic acid; fiber; and other nutrients), and evidence for nutrient shortages; and a comparison of the late paleolithic diet to the current U.S. diet and the current U.S. dietary recommendations.
The article is not accessible at the link, but it is interesting to see that Eaton's ground-breaking paper has already been cited about 50 times.
Here's an abstract of a later report in which his theory is spelled out more (emphases mine):
Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century.Cordain L, Eaton SB, Sebastian A, Mann N, Lindeberg S, Watkins BA, O'Keefe JH, Brand-Miller J.
Am J Clin Nutr. 2005 Feb;81(2):341-54.
"There is growing awareness that the profound changes in the environment (eg, in diet and other lifestyle conditions) that began with the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry approximately 10000 y ago occurred too recently on an evolutionary time scale for the human genome to adjust. In conjunction with this
discordance between our ancient, genetically determined biology and the nutritional, cultural, and activity patterns of contemporary Western populations, many of the so-called
diseases of civilization have emerged. In particular, food staples and food-processing procedures introduced during the Neolithic and Industrial Periods have fundamentally altered 7 crucial nutritional characteristics of ancestral hominin diets: 1) glycemic load, 2) fatty acid composition, 3) macronutrient composition, 4) micronutrient density, 5) acid-base balance, 6) sodium-potassium ratio, and 7) fiber content. The evolutionary collision of our ancient genome with the nutritional qualities of recently introduced foods may underlie many of the chronic diseases of Western civilization."
Warning: don't read his stuff as a prescription on what to eat or bother debating his food recommendations--it's out-of-date and
his own views on what foods to eat have changed and continue to evolve as more research is done. Eaton's writings are mainly important now for their historical contribution and for explanation of the basic theory and mechanism that underpins Paleolithic nutrition. It's the only nutritional model proposed in the scientific community with actual predictive value--which is what is important from a scientific perspective.
Loren Cordain is Boyd Eaton's protege and Cordain now leads an international team of scientists that is doing most of the research in this new field (though Phinney, Rosedale and others have also done very important research).
Plea for civility: Cordain tends to be hated on forums like this because of his emphasis on lean commercial meats instead of pasture-fed meats and fats (I recommend the latter), but I have never seen him respond with anything but politeness and reasonableness and he is doing more work to promote Paleo diet research than anyone in the world, so I hope people will refrain from using this as yet another opportunity for personal insults and instead focus on the science. I don't agree with him on some important issues too, but trash fests ruin productive threads like this one.
Thanks,
Phil