The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging [Hardcover]

Several people have expressed disappointment with "The New Evolution Diet", and I find exception with them. Perhaps they are expecting too much since many are subscribers to the author's website. Here is what you need to know in very simple language in just a few paragraphs. There are thousands of books out there on fitness, dieting, longevity, etc. They basically all fail in their objective because none of them start out with who we really are from an evolutionary standpoint. We also know that if any of these diet books worked, we would all flock to it. It would be scientifically confirmed, and all of us would be back down to a normal size, but no such book exists. The key to the puzzle is to use an evolutionary approach.

Our ancestors go back several million years. You can go to the Museum of Natural History in New York and see Lucy's bones, one of our ancestors that go back five million years. Turkana Boy goes back 3 million years. His bones are also in the museum. Scientists believe that our biology has not changed in at least 200,000 years. This means that if we could take a new born child from the time of his birth 200,000 years ago, he should be able to grow up in our society perfectly adjusted both physically and mentally. The only real argument against this concept is Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious.

So here is the key point. Our bodies and souls were formed over a period of time lasting hundreds of thousands of years. Life did not change much during this period, however in the last several hundred years' life has changed drastically. We have to go back tens of thousands of years to the so called cave man to understand how our bodies are hardwired to live a certain way. What was life like 400,000 years ago when our biology was formed. The one thing we absolutely do not know is how long it will take for our species to genetically adapt to its new modern environment - the 20th and 21st century if you will. The answer has to be tens of thousands of additional years.

Life in 400,000 BC

We were hunter / gatherers. We went out for food when we were hungry. There was no refrigeration. There were no 3 balanced meals a day nonsense, none of the advice about eating small portions. The idea of one hour a day for exercise was nonsense too. Humans lived like lions. When they found large amounts of food they ate lavishly and then hung out and lay around like the lions do today. We ate grass fed meats, our fish was not salmon harvested on farms but wild caught fish. There were fresh fruits and vegetables. That's it because agriculture did not come into being until 10,000 years ago, when humans figured out how to sow seed and grow produce in predetermined areas.

We have gotten completely away from our previous evolutionary lifestyles, and this has cost us dearly. We are now the most overweight nation in history, and getting heavier. It has to stop, and this book gives you an answer that works. The answer is to live and eat PALEO, meaning live like you were in the cave man era. This means you will mimic the diet and lifestyle of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. You can do this with very little input from any other sources. Just think about it. Our ancestors did not have bread products. They couldn't bake, and so our body systems are not genetically engineered to handle the refined carbohydrate products we ingest. Makes sense doesn't it? Dairy products like cheese did not exist, and again our bodies are not adapted for it. We may adapt over the next couple of hundred thousand years, but that does not help us now.

Read this Book - It will change your life!!!

Unlike other readers, I have found the author to be excellent at spelling out for you exactly how the caveman diet works and what the implications are for each of us. Just always keep in mind that we were genetically engineered to survive in a world different from our own. You want to eat only those foods that the early cave man ate. You want to skip meals now and then also because there were no regular supplies of food throughout the tens of thousands of years of human history. We also live just as long as our ancestors did. This is a major misinterpretation of history. Our ancestors suffered far greater death at the hands of infections, accidents, predators, and infant mortality. That is why people say that we live longer today, but simply is not true.

The book points out that most diet books will tell us to exercise more, and eat less. Our genetic impulse is the opposite, and this is just about the only book that points this out. We are programmed by our biological history to gorge ourselves on food when it is available. Our biological desire is not to exercise but lord over the land like the lions with periodic bursts of energy required to hunt and gather food.

CONCLUSION:

I loved De Vany's work and the author has hit the nail right on the head. If you read this book and thoroughly engross yourself in it for a month or two while following its tailored program, you will effectuate CHANGE your world. You will replicate the caveman's experience, and your body will respond by moving towards your individualized optimum weight. There is simply no other way to do it that will have a lasting effect. We have to return to our ancestral roots, and live in congruence with who and what we are. Read the book and change your life, and thank you for reading this review.

Richard C. Stoyeck

I got 17% done with this book (according to my Kindle) before the gaping holes in the scientific logic finally annoyed me to the point of putting it down. And the thing is, the purported "science" in the first 17% of this book mostly covered widely accepted facts about things like insulin, exericse, and weight control. If de Vany attempted to cover less widely covered areas of scientific human research (for example, the history of Homo sapiens' diet) in the later parts of the book, I can't even imagine how badly he must have botched those up.

I managed to ignore the first errors in thinking, but after a few percent into the book, I started keeping tabs on pages where I found lapses in de Vany's judgment. A few examples:

Page 33: He calls LDL "bad cholesterol" and HDL "good cholesterol". That's a gross oversimplification that's based on the same kind of thinking that led to the cholesterol-and-heart-health hypothesis that was widely propagated but is now widely considered wrong. FYI, the cholesterol carried in molecules of LDL and HDL are identical. Calling them "bad" and "good" cholesterol respectively is inaccurate and misleading. De Vany also makes no mention of VLDL (a subset of LDL), without which any discussion about LDL and HDL is incomplete. For a discussion that does these lipoproteins justice, I suggest "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, which describes their actual mechanisms in great detail.

Page 36: The author claims that "every time you eat, you turn off your body's fat-burning mechanism." Technically true, but I'm bothered by his implication here that if you eat 2000 calories spread out through 6 meals, you might gain weight, but if you eat those calories over only 2-3 meals, you'll lose weight. This is simply not true. If you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose fat. He's right that "your metabolism burns glucose before fat", but if you eat only a little glucose over 6 meals, this will inhibit your fat burning no more than eating the same amount of glucose in 2 meals. This has been confirmed by study after study. Important to de Vany's hypothesis about paleolithic eating is that ancient human hunter-gatherers didn't have a predictable meal pattern. But he's wrong if he thinks that frequent eating will inherently cause us to become hyperinsulenemic and overweight.

Page 43: The author advises to "avoid bananas (which have too much carbohydrate)." I have two problems with this statement. First, if bananas indeed have a high concetration of carbohydrate, then couldn't you simply eat a smaller portion to not take in as many carbohyrates? Second, a medium banana has 27g of carbohydrates according to nutritiondata.com. This is only 2 more grams of carbohydrate than a medium apple contains, and it's 8 *fewer* grams than a typical mango contains, yet he wholeheartedly recommends those foods in his list of "Fruits to Eat." If he bans one fruit based on its high carbohydrate content, shouldn't he ban other fruits with equally high or even higher carbohydrate content? His inconsistency should be a concern to any reader who cares about the scientific integrity of a book like this.

Page 44: More inconsistencies: On page 44, de Vany claims that "no fat is particularly good for you." Then on the very next page, he says "there is abundant evidence that omega-3 oils have a beneficial effect on inflammation and even obesity. [These oils] also promote brain health. Sometimes I take a cod liver oil capsule." First he says that no fat is good for you, but then professes the incredible health benefits of omega-3 fats and says he even supplements them! Which one is it? I'm just glad I know enough about fats to catch this inconsistency; now I know to be wary of every claim in his book, because he might be equally uncertain or flat-out wrong about them too. Of course, this is all ignoring the fact that it's downright ignorant to claim that "no fat is particularly good for you." All types of fat, including polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, and saturated fatty acids, have been found to have unique health benefits for the body. There's even a trans fat (conjugated linoleic acid) that has been studied for positive health effects. "No fat is particularly good for you" is perhaps the most laughable line I've ever read in a book about the human diet.

Page 46: Has the line "You may eat some dairy." This recommendation confuses me. De Vany claims that all grains should be removed from the diet on the basis that humans have no evolutionary adaptation to them, yet most available evidence shows that humans have been eating grains much longer than we have been eating dairy (albeit not at the high levels we eat them today). Using his logic, shouldn't it be more pertinent to cut dairy products than grains? De Vany also recommends "unsweetened yogurt or cheese in small amounts" as his dairy products of choice. Um, where would paleolithic humans have gotten yogurt or cheese? Isn't it much more likely that they would have consumed much higher quantities of plain milk than yogurt or cheese?

Page 47: He says that "butter and lard should be avoided completely", and instead you should eat the oils of "olive and canola, and maybe a little sesame oil for taste." First, his oil recommendations contradict his earlier statement that no fat is particularly good for you. If they're not good for us, why would we consume them in concentrated oil form? Second, I have no idea why he condemns the usage of butter and lard. After all, he recommends dairy products like yogurt and cheese--aren't the fats in butter the exact same as the fats in yogurt and cheese? And lard is just pig fat, which is similar in composition to the fats of mammals and fowl that our paleolithic humans would have hunted. If our paleolithic ancestors caught a particularly fat, I don't know, deer or something, do you think they would have shyed away from eating the delicious fat? Of course not! But oh, de Vany justifies this recommendation by saying "you'll get the fats you need from the animal protein you eat..." Okay, let me stop that quote right there. You can get fat from animal protein? Come again? Protein contains fat? I assume he means that the muscle tissue of animals contains fat as well as protein. But that is a much different thing than saying that protein contains fat. That line is second most laughable of the book.

I put bookmarks on many other troubling pages as well, but frankly I'm sick of typing of this review so I'll stop right here. The lapses in de Vany's thinking in these simple parts of the book give me cognitive dissonance. How can I simultaneously believe that what he says is true while also thinking that everything he claims may be as inaccurate as the quotes I've cited above? This is not the scientific analysis of the merits and content of the paleolithic diet that I wanted. I haven't read any other books about paleo eating, but I know enough to know that this book cannot give you the solid information that any potential new dieter deserves.

The New Evolution Diet is a practical guide to eating, moving, and exercising like our Paleolithic ancestors. Dr. De Vany, an economist by training, did a great job of writing for non-academicians. But don't let his lack of credentials in the fields of health and nutrition dissuade you from reading this book. He has applied his academic research training to this topic with good results. The book makes heavy use of footnotes and also includes an appendix with additional reading suggestions if you aren't willing to take him at his word or you want to do more research yourself.

This is not your typical diet book, but then it really isn't presenting a diet plan, it is more about lifestyle. While he does tell you what to eat, and what not to eat (in terms of types of food), there aren't any recipes in this book. He does have a chapter called A Month on the New Evolution Diet that makes suggestions on what to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day, as well as what exercise to do, but it is presented as a loose guideline. From reading the rest of the book the reader should be able to make up their own mind about what they want to eat and how they want to exercise to implement the evolutionary fitness lifestyle.

Sections I found the most helpful and interesting were the chapters on the metaphysics behind the diet and on aging. The arguments, backed up by study after study, that over-consumption of carbohydrates, especially sugars, are the primary cause of our society's main health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and even cancer are very compelling. I also especially liked the Afterword by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan) entitled When the Human Body Needs (Extreme) Randomness.

The chapter on How to Exercise was very informative, mainly because he spends a fair amount of time telling us how NOT to exercise. Endurance training, cardio, and extended strength training sessions are all dismissed as not only unnecessary, but are actually harmful. He does describe what exercises to do and how to do them and leads us through one of his visits to the gym. Pictures of some of the exercises would have been helpful, but a simple YouTube search will turn up instructional videos for any exercise you don't know how to do, so that isn't really a problem.

The only complaint I have about this book is that he doesn't provide references on where to buy some of the supplements he recommends. He endorses Ultrathione Health Packs for antioxidants but doesn't tell you where you can buy them. A web search turned up a dubious site with many misspellings and a PayPal ecommerce site. That didn't inspire confidence in me to risk placing an order.

By now it should seem obvious that the conventional wisdom on diet and exercise of the last 40 years has been a total failure. Unfortunately the "experts", unwilling to admit their mistakes, are doubling down on their advice and now recommend that we eat even less and exercise even more. Thankfully there are some voices of reason out there telling us to look to human evolution for the answers to our health problems and Dr. De Vany's is one of the best voices in that community.