Well, dairy products aren't technically Paleo. A lot of us are just choosing to eat them, but you'll also find plenty of people who don't. I don't touch cheese for instance, and I use butter and heavy whipping cream mainly during bulking diets. There is a general trend in the Paleo community right now that is moving away from evolutionary foods ordained by the gods, towards an "eat real whole foods" methodology. Grass-fed butter, raw milk, etc. can all be hugely nutritious, so why not go for them? The main caveat about neolithic foods is to test tolerance. The way to test tolerance is to eliminate for 3-4 weeks, and then reintroduce one food group at a time to observe symptoms.

My opinion is that diet should not be a doctrine, and I think Paleo is largely trying to not let itself become one.

Again, we're confusing the entire premise of "eating paleo". We are not trying to literally eat the exact same foods as our ancestors, as this would be impossible. None of the animals, fruits, or vegetables that they consumed are around anymore. The point, and I cannot stress this enough, is to use their health and diet as a baseline to generate hypotheses to see what foods really are good for us nowadays. Olive oil is a neolithic food, but we still tolerate it just fine. Like others here have said, some do well on dairy, some do not. I use heavy cream in my coffee everyday and I eat some cheese when I'm at work (I'm a bartender) because it can be really hard to get any decent calories in me when I'm working behind a bar for 10 hours. Cheese is a bunch of good fats, and I can deal with the rest of it.

So don't get caught up in the whole "they didn't eat it, so I shouldn't". That's really not the point here.

Read: http://coachcanadan.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/allow-me-to-clarify/

They are paleo because we like them. That's also why we are supposed to eat like our ancestors, but its OK to have whey protein and test ourselves all day.

I never really "got" this either. It appears that human-raised livestock, i.e. grass-fed beef, which would not have been around in the paleolithic, is embraced wholeheartedly, but dairy, which comes from the same beastie, is not. The argumentation from the "dairy is neolithic" position thus doesn't seem logical to me, because beef is too. I think the real reason for the dairy no-no more likely comes from the issue with milk sugars, which some people have a hard time digesting. IMHO fermenting the milk into kefir, yogurt and cheese takes care of most of the sugar for most people, and butter and cream have enough fat to offset their effect on blood sugar for those with blood sugar issues. I am happily "primal" because I have no lactose issues, and as another person said, it's a good source of healthy fats not to mention B-vitamins, calcium and K2.

Because anyone who's smart about paleo isn't doing it in some obsessive spirit of reenactment. If cheese, cream, and butter are not harmful to an individual -- as for many people they seem not to be -- there is no problem. They clearly provide a healthy source of saturated fat.

It depends on what you mean by paleo. If you mean trying to imitate the lifestyle of paleolithic man as closely as possible -- what people sometimes call reenactment -- then dairy certainly isn't paleo. Neither is your bed, your car, your computer, your treated water, or the grocery store.

But if you mean using our knowledge of the way most of our ancestors ate and lived to make smart choices about how we eat and live today, then some dairy may very well be paleo. If ancestral humans ate foods that had similar macro and micro nutrient profiles as butter and cream, then we may be well adapted to those foods.

To put it another way: just because something wasn't available in paleo times doesn't mean that if it had existed, paleo man couldn't have thrived on it. It's not like everything that paleo man didn't eat is automatically poison to us.

I got into a similar argument involving my love of avocados... as they were not available in the paleolithic and have been bred only over the past 500 years or so to even have enough flesh for human consumption.

My response? So what?

I do eat fairly copious amounts of kerrygold butter. On the other hand, as much as I love cheese I hardly eat it (mostly because good cheese is $$$, and a binge trigger for me). Some mornings (maybe twice a month) I might put heavy cream in my coffee. I purposely avoid lactose because I get ill from it. But I don't restrict Dairy because it isn't "paleo" - I restrict dairy because I don't how I feel when I eat foods I can't / don't digest well. I still consider my overall diet "paleo" - in fact a lot closer to 1.0 principles than most (I avoid starches), but in the grand scheme of things, the impact of dairy is much less severe than the impact of beans, grains, and tubers to my body.

If I did find a grain I could tolerate well (Oats are the only likely candidate thusfar, but I only eat tiny amounts in haggis) I might try those.

For myself, I use(d) Paleo as the base of the way I eat... and then evolved it to suit my specific needs.

Dr. Cate has two great blog posts about this topic:

http://drcate.com/is-dairy-paleo-revising-history-with-new-persectives-on-flocks-of-goats-femur-bones-and-feckless-nutritionism/

http://drcate.com/is-dairy-paleo-part-2-revising-history-with-new-perspectives-on-flocks-of-goats-femur-bones-and-feckless-nutritionism/

Dairy is definatly a grey area to me.A few rules i try to follow:

1 Restrict insulin promoting dairy ie milk 2 Eat fermented unpasturised from a good source 3 As with everything do in moderation

I tried to live without dairy for two months and didnt really notice a difference now im in poland visiting family and have access to fresh cow and goats milk from family. I think this has a diffferent taste altogether and "feels" more natural (i know it sounds crazy but i can feel it nourishing my body!).

When back in england i dont bother with shop bought milk. its just not worth it.

As some have said already, if they're well-tolerated by an individual, there's no reason to avoid them. "Because the caveman" did or didn't do something isn't really the final say on a food or lifestyle. None of us really live like cavemen.

My understanding is that it's different from Atkins in the food quality approach, and in the fact that Paleo itself isn't necessarily low-carb. I suppose any version of Paleo is lower carb than the SAD or AHA recommended diet, but Paleo is mainly concerned with food quality. Macronutrient ratios will vary from individual to individual.

Who cares? Why be obsessive about it?

Of course they're not paleo. Every bite you eat is Neolithic unless you eat wild things.

More and more I believe the best way to emulate our ancestors is to include plenty of meat in the diet and to stay very active. The rest is playful reenactment, not to be taken too seriously.

Butter, cheese and cream taste good.

That is why.

It's my understanding that it's a fudging of the rules, based on lactose. The lactose in dairy products causes problems because many humans haven't fully evolved lactase persistence to break it down; however, "processed" dairy products such as butter and cream (doing anything to the milk besides drinking it is a form of processing) have most of their lactose removed. Since the evolutionary bad actor is gone, and they're delicious, many consider them consistent with a paleo diet in a scientific sense, though not historically accurate.