I saw google trends, and it simply confirmed what I'd said so far. A few years prior to c.2007, interest was negligible followed by a sudden surge in 2007 onwards. I am sure there were also sudden upward surges in the past, like with all other diets. The test will be to see if interest stays high for more than just another 5 years.
Sure, it will slope off after a certain point, sure, but the difference is that people will see that it works better than any of the other aforementioned approaches in improving health and so it will maintain a significant following and my guess is that the overall Paleo community (including raw Paleo) will be substantially larger in the long run than either Atkins or raw veganism. It will likely be a somewhat elite following, since Paleo is
generally more expensive than eating beans and tortillas or rice and peas or potatoes and cabbage every day. Some people today work around high market prices for pastured animal foods by hunting or raising animals or eating more animal fat and organs than lean meats, but not everyone can hunt or farm and prices for animal fats and organs will increase as demand increases (and I'm already seeing this in my area), with increases in supply only able to counteract part of the increase.
That past era in which bodybuilders ate healthier foods was not terribly palaeo, but more focused on the raw aspect. Randy Roach mentions nulerous examples of raw vegan bodybuilders as well as those who consumed lots of raw dairy.
I didn't write anything to the contrary of that and haven't studied it enough to draw firm conclusions. Nonetheless also, Josh is right that some of the new Paleo dieters have come from the fitness and bodybuilding areas like Crossfit and those others I mentioned, and from what I understand, Randy Roach and others have written about raw eggs, meat and blood, not just raw veganism. Plus, adding some raw animal foods to the diet seems to appeal more to bodybuilders than going on a raw vegan diet. So nothing you've written here contradicts anything I've written in this thread, other than your opinion of where things will go.
In interesting aside: my father has mentioned that the athletic teams he coached decades ago used to eat steaks--many rare--baked potato, raw green salad and full-fat milk for pre-game meals and the whole team ate basically the same thing, but later there was a growing trend toward feeding teams meals composed of carby, more modern, heavily processed foods like spaghetti, pizza, sub sandwiches, french fries, soda pop and low-fat chocolate milk and toward letting players choose their own pre-game meals, which tend to include a lot of the latter. My father was puzzled by the change, but went along with it because the nutritionists were telling the coaches that carb loading and high carbs in general was the way to go. Now that he has benefited from Paleo nutrition himself, he thinks he was right to question the change and wishes that he had gone with what his brain was telling him at the time instead of the so-called "experts". He's not a zero carber by any means, but he thinks that feeding athletes pizza, spaghetti and soda pop was a mistake.
