The only examples of anything like a raw paleo diet are isolated tribes like Inuit and maybe some Africans and South Americans, but these are getting few and far between.
When people get blood work done and their "numbers" and with the "normal range" what does that mean? The normal range of people in a society that is extremely unhealthy? Where does the idea of "normal" come from? This is an important idea since we don't consider the diet and lifestyle of most people as "normal" and definitely not healthy.
There's height/weight charts for growing children, food guide pyramid and other information based on caloric needs determined by weight, and a ton of other standard measures. And other than them are the non standard measures such as how a person looks, what people think constitutes a healthy looking individual. Things like morning sickness in pregnant women, getting "colds" a few times a year, food poisoning from bacteria are al considerd "normal" and not viewed as symptoms of a persistent state of poor health. Add to that list a 1 in 3 (or even greater, keeps increasing) chance of getting cancer, good odds also of heart disease, impotence in men, increasing infertility of men and women and a slew of digestive, skin and muscle disorders are being seen as normal afflictions that are not caused by the lifestyle of the individual. Even a disease like diabetes which is so obviously caused by diet is starting to be viewed as genetic in origin.
The concept of health in a community such as the raw paleo forum is so disconnected from the concept in the greater population. What can this mean in the greater context?
I for one do not always enjoy being on the fringe. I tend to always be, politically, art tastes, diet and general lifestyle choices of mine are usually at least a little on the edge of society and very often way off in the fringe area. This leads some people to have suggested in the past that I do things that are unique or rare just to appear special or just to not conform, which is a form of conforming itself (conforming to nonconformist attitude). But I don't, I choose what I do based on whether I like it or not. I'd love for society at large to have attitudes on the above topics closer to mine. I don't like having to angrily change the radio station every time I hear a story (public radio) about the latest pharmaceutical researcher receiving a Nobel or hearing some politician lie about something.
What about the health of society? There is debate about the issue, but many believe that older societies had less intra-societal violence, disease, insanity/mental retardation etc. Are people in most of today's modern societies taking these macro-health issues as normal as well? Do most people consider it normal to have dozens or hundreds of murders every year in major cities? For a certain percentage of people to become insane or otherwise mentally impaired and become a danger to themselves and others? It has been normal for a while now for the world to be constantly poised towards war, in fact since WWI I don't think there has been global peace for one second.
So what is the normal human condition? Do we believe that we know it or are we striving for something we cannot see or understand yet? Is the breakdown of societal and human health the eventual outcome of a species with such controlling powers over their environment? Could human history have happened any other way? And more simply, what does health look like?
