This author's conversion experience is even less convincing than most -- the article is poorly reasoned, short on data, and full of glaring inconsistencies. For example, when he is in the "tried everything" stage he "ate the universally recommended high-carbohydrate, low-fat foods: lots of rice, lentils, pasta, oats, fish, chicken and fruit and veg, but little red meat." And then, the salvation-imparting Paleolithic Diet recommends "lean meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, but no grains, beans or dairy."

Um, I might be nuts, but those don't sound all that terribly different. Especially when you consider that standard dietary recommendations don't actually emphasize rice and pasta so much, unless they are whole-grain.

(This is something I've noticed in most diets: sweeping, dramatic, and poorly-substantiated claims about how the human health and metabolic systems work, followed by advice that is all fairly reasonable and therefore remarkably similar, often involving the desirability of fish and fruits and vegetables.)

He natters on about the supposed fitness and leanness of our "cave ancestors," ignoring the famously unslim stone age Venus of Willendorf, the fact that most Paleolithic humans lived to be about 40 if they were lucky, and, oh yeah, food scarcity pretty much ensures leanness.

Also, the Paleolithic era is pre-history, which means that anything we think we know about it is largely conjecture. Which makes it fair game for both religions and diets that want to make out like we lived in some kind of pre-fallen perfection a mere 10,000 years ago. Devotees of the Paleolithic diet (and Atkins of the Atkins Diet) believe that agricultural revolution was a big mistake -- this article actually claims "the rot set in" when humans started farming instead of hunting and gathering.

Right, "the rot." Guess what? That rot is called "civilization" and frankly, I'm rather fond of it. It has its downside -- people are jerks, and also, pollution -- but it's not like we can just abandon it now. Whoops, civilization, big mistake. I mean, we might end up in some kind of post-civilized wasteland anyway, and maybe some trigger-happy survivalists think that's a good idea, but personally I like hot showers, the coffee trade, and, you know, books and things. Did cave people have books? Not hardly. Did they have coffee? Only some of them. Some lucky, lucky people who lived in parts of what are today Africa and Indonesia.

Anyway, it's not like hunter-gatherers didn't destroy their environment too. Humans in North America probably hunted the mammoth to extinction. Thickly populated valleys could become quite polluted just from campfire smoke. Their idea of sewage treatment was "dump the human waste downstream" and they cut down trees willy-nilly.

If their world, overall, was cleaner than ours, it's only because there were fewer of them and they had a lower level of technology -- it's not because they were, in some esoteric way, better than we are.

But this diet seems largely concerned with "man-the-hunter" mythmaking. Note the emphasis on the fact that the pre-salvation diet had "little red meat," and also this post-salvation orgy of offal when the author describes a trip to the butcher shop:

"five pounds of mince to make up bolognese and chilli sauces <..> six pork chops, big joints of beef, kidneys and a slice or two of liver."

(Here is where you can tell the author is a Brit, not only because he refers to what is, I think, ground meat of some kind as "mince," but also because he seems to be intending to actually eat those liver and kidneys himself.)

Then he goes on to purchase olive oil, cans of tuna and corned beef, an assortment of nuts, and a few raisins.

At this point, the complete and utter lack of resemblance to anything a Paleolithic human would have eaten should be starting to become obvious.

I would be more impressed with his conversion if he realized that he needed to eat only food that he caught and killed himself, and then talked about that. (Something very similar made for a fascinating Stranger article.)

Or if he realized that he needed to eat only food that could have been obtained during the Stone Age on what is today the island of Great Britain -- which I do not think included olive oil, raisins, or any of the nuts he mentioned, but might include the surprising edibility of things not normally eaten today, such as cattails (bulrushes, to a Brit).

No, instead, he's decided that corned beef is a more "natural" human food than boiled oatmeal. Because... er... because humans discovered the trick of pickling meat in brine before the trick of boiling grains in water?

But no, you see, farming is the cause of all the world's ills: "As farming took over the world, bringing with it new foods such as bread and dairy products, so our health and fitness declined. We got fatter, and shorter."

Right, that happened 10,000 years ago. Except that it didn't. Until very recently, we just kept getting taller, and living longer, and right now it's mostly Americans who are getting shorter again. The fatness trend of the past twenty years might be rather alarming, but seriously, why look 10,000 years in the past to explain something that started happening a generation ago?

Current obesity trends are readily explained by caloric consumption data and exercise habits -- you don't need a special secret theory about how oatmeal is really poison or certain blood types should avoid beer or whatever.

The author's conversion to stone-aginess just keeps getting nuttier, when he talks about giving up jogging in favor of "weightlifting workouts that mimicked the activities of ancient hunter-gatherers."

He's giving up jogging? When studies show that humans are physiologically the only mammal optimized for long-distance running? And that this is probably why we are hairless and sweaty? And that maybe our prehistoric ancestors werecursorial hunters? Please, if you are trying to get in touch with your inner Cro-Magnon, jogging is the last exercise you should give up.

Plus, marvel at the nonsense: in the interests of living more like our ancient ancestors, he is giving up the exercise that can be done with the body alone, in favor of one that requires special manufactured equipment.

One final bit of crazy, as he the author relates a little story about Owsley "the Bear" Stanley, a famed LSD chemist from the 60s, who has eaten an all-meat diet for nearly 50 years. See, when he was a kid, he read that "Eskimos" ate only meat and fish and were very healthy, so naturally humans are meant to be carnivores, and the heart attack that he had recently can be entirely blamed on "the broccoli and other 'poisonous' vegetables his mother used to feed him as a boy."

Which seems to confirm my "man-the-hunter" suspicions, although you'd think that most people would recognize that telling a funny story about a crazy man who thinks vegetables are poison would weaken the power of their testimonial overall.

So, listen, if you get results from this Paleolithic Diet stuff -- fine, eat whatever you want, but please get a grip on yourself -- you are not a caveman. Your food comes from the butcher shop, dude. The grocery store. Somebody harvested it hundreds of miles away and then put it on a truck and the truck took it somewhere else where it was packaged and then put on another truck, and maybe there was a plane or a boat or a couple more trucks involved, and then it was taken to your grocery story so you could eat it out of a can. A can!

You sleep in a building, okay? Not a cave. You probably have a bed. Probably a television. This article proves to me that you have a computer and Internet access. I don't know what you do for a living, but I'm willing to bet that it's not killing and gathering your own food. If you hunt it's for fun and you have access to weapons that would have made your Paleolithic ancestors weep with envy. I'm betting you didn't make your clothes yourself.

And hey, guess what, the fact that you are in your late 30s/early 40s and worried about a spare tire means that you are a venerated tribal elder. Except that you're not, because you are probably going to live another 40-60 years. And also, you probably don't know how to start a fire without matches.

There was a reason our ancestors thought civilization was a good idea.