When introducing people to the concept of paleo, I find some are far more open to the idea than others. From what I've observed, it seems to depend on a number of things which include culture, age and educational background. Back when my diet was low-fat and plant-based, my parents were constantly berating me for my food choices and blaming all my problems on lack of fat (how do they know this stuff!?). But since I revealed to them my diet, I haven't heard a peep from them; my mom's initial reaction when I told her I wasn't eating grains anymore was 'Well, they are in the Bible.. but it's not like you need them.' So.. about a 9? (; She hasn't adopted the diet for herself, but I really don't think she'd have a hard time transitioning.
Most of my family reacted the same. My grandma (age 88) believes the more red meat you eat, the healthier you become. As far as I can remember, my aunts on my dad's side (all 8 of them) have always turned to eliminating refined carbs to lose weight, turning down fruit juices and pastries outright at Sunday brunch. I suspect this has a lot to do with culture (in our case, Mexican-American) and the way my grandma cooked and raised them: with an emphasis on healthy tradition.
My boyfriend was also a 10 on the receptivity scale, especially after having watched Fat Head! His mom, however, is skeptical and believes grapeseed oil is the healthiest to cook with, for whatever reason. She's at, like, a 2.
For me, it was about a 9. In my English class last year, we watched Forks Over Knives and, having been struggling with panic disorder and hypochondriasis for some time, I was skeptical that a diet that seemed so unnatural to me was cited as a path toward a disease-proof life, yet it intrigued me somehow. I started researching the film a few days later and, so luckily, found Denise Minger's analysis of the film, which also fully exposed me to paleo for the first time (I'd only heard of it before). I had also been taking a marine biology course and pondering the differences between organisms living in their natural habitat--living instinctually and just knowing what to eat and when and how--and humans, who, of course, have the painful luxury of choosing to gorge on pretty much whatever they feel like pleasing their palates with. When I started reading up on paleo principles, it kind of just clicked and made sense to me that we should eat what we were designed to eat.
Still, thanks to the CW I'd been inundated with, I was fairly terrified of saturated fat. Gary Taubes and Denise Minger changed that for me. (;
My best friend is enrolled in a nutrition certification course and although her professors (all certified personal trainers, most dieticians), from what she's told me, place emphasis on challenging conventional wisdom, and though she follows a high-fat, low-carb diet model, she still believes in arbitrary rules for reducing saturated fat. She also thinks I'm slowing my metabolism by not eating every 3 hours, like she does. She has no interest in changing her diet but it's by default pretty paleo and she tends to agree with most aspects of my diet, so she's at about a 7.
What about you guys? How receptive were you to paleo, and what do you think it depended on most?
