If someone could get Barack Obama, Tom Brady, or Lady Gaga to go paleo, that would slingshot paleo into the public eye.

from another answer in a related thread:

"One more thing. Nassim Taleb is a great spreader of the ancestral health meme, outside the immediate paleosphere. I think that paleo deserves a few other great meme-spreaders (is that a word?). I'm not really talking about celebrities, but more about intelligent people, capable of reaching a bigger audience. People like Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, EO Wilson, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond and the likes.

But hey, Scarlett Johansson would be OK too! ;-)

Oh, that, and a TED-talk on paleo/ancestral living, that would be nice."

I am actually thinking about having a barefoot 5k race for charity in Austin, TX next spring. My paleo/primal meetup group will team up with our local barefoot group and our nat mov group. We are still in the very early planning stages though.

Teach a course on food and health! I'm doing that at UC Berkeley this semester. It's amazing to see the variety of reactions in challenging conventional wisdom.

I live in a small community that has a local newspaper. I write letters to the editor pointing out fallacies and misconceptions about healthy diet that appear constantly in the newspaper. (I do the same thing in comments on the Washington Post and NYT.) All too often I see advice on "Eating Healthy" that tells readers to avoid saturated fat, eat plenty of whole grains, watch dietary cholesterol, substitute canola oil and such for butter, etc. To its credit, my local newspaper publishes my letters. I also discuss these issues with just about anyone who is willing to listen, whether I am in line at a store or at the gym or outside. I try to point out the lack of evidence for the conventional wisdom and the abundance of studies supporting paleo principles. I don't rant or scream and I provide links and printed materials to anyone interested. I feel it's what I can do.

Paleo Hikes, Paleo Walks and Paleo Sprints (instead of marathons).

i think positioning Paleo as a counter-argument to PETA and veganism is a mistake. robb wolf and others have made the excellent point that many "alternative" thinkers (and many of them smart, thoughtful folks) have embraced veg/veganism to the degree that they own the "ethics" space in the food/nutrition discussion. regardless of the fact that i disagree with PETA, it's kind of like taking any position "against" firefighters or police here in NYC after 9/11 - you were a fool to do it. they owned the emotional and moral discussion, period.

promoting the lifestyle from a wellness perspective (rather than positioning it as a fringe response to veganism) seems smart to me, and there's no doubt that having a celebrity backer who isn't blatantly insane would do wonders. the concept of teams of Paleo participants in races and walks-for-cures is great - these walks have mobilized MILLIONS of otherwise sedentary people.

not to mention that every time i see coverage of these walks, i notice that they are made up of generally overweight people, who appear to believe that insufficient money for more research is why cancer and diabetes haven't been cured yet. it would be a great mental trick to have a horde of healthy Paleo folk there, eating jerky (or nothing at all) and drinking water instead of cracking out on Gatorade and energy bars to "power through" a modest walk.

The best way to promote something is to show that it actually works! As the number of blogs showing paleo success stories grows, and as more services and books catering to this niche also grows, people who actually care about their health will take notice. For the others, you can't force them to take control of their health, they have to take that first step on their own.

Trying to get involved in politics to promote 'paleo' is misguided in my opinion. Paleo is one of the first health/diet movements to be birthed on the internet and that has allowed it to adapt and evolve, learning and advancing at a quick pace (eg paleohacks). Why would you want to constrain this phenomenon within a bureaucracy? That doesn't mean you should not get political at all, there are many issues to get involved with such as FDA reform, farm subsidies, etc, but those are not advocacy issues. It is fighting a futile battle to try and reform school lunch programs and government mandated diet programs--we will do our thing and let others do theirs, and let the fittest survive.

I'm going to ask why we would want Paleo to go mainstream?