You are very focused on lectins, so let me just drop this in here: the actual lectin molecule type vary from legume to legume. Eat 10 dry kidney beans, and the specific lectins in the red kidney bean will kill you (cooking denatures most of them). Fresh green beans or sugar snap peas? Almost undetectable levels of lectins, and what little there is seems innocuous.

My very first metric for paleo-ness is answering "Can it be eaten raw?" No, that doesn't read "EAT RAW FOOD!" nor does it state that food must not be cooked. However, if the food is safe raw, it is likely safe cooked, even though it's nutrition profile may change. Non-paleo cooked wheat becomes less nutritious when cooked (even though it then becomes actually edible!), whereas many meats become more nutritional dense (often a result of fat mass lost from cooking).

So, those sugar snap peas and green beans? I eat 'em. Jicama? The plant is a legume, but I eat the tuberous root.

What about foods that weren't in the human diet until well into the neolithic and even the modern era? Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, carrots, jicama, or ... pluots? Eat 'em. They often cause more concern that a food that has more history (blackberries, figs), but many people handle them very, very well even though some have allergies.

Also, ... So how can I independently verify for my self, the paleoness of food, with out taking the word of the writers and bloggers? ... this is impossible to answer on a forum where people are writing to you. Just sayin'.

Paleo isn't about actual reenactment - it's about firm stances on certain neolithic foods (eg. grains), and openness to traditional foods: meat(and fish), eggs, veggies, fruits, and nuts.

Dairy is an outlier, as it is clearly and animal product, but is most often eaten in highly processed forms -- many paleo-types have varying opinions on dairy. I haven't hunted a mammal down and eaten the entire thing, so my experience eating udders is nonexistent. I am however, lactose intolerant, so I am not compelled to eat dairy. Butter and ghee on the other hand ...

I am actually with you on this question. As more research comes out we find people storing, eating and cultivating grains and legumes earlier and earlier. I find it impossible to believe that Grok refused any available foods he ran across including wild grains and peas. Just because he didn't cultivate them doesn't mean he didn't eat them. If he ate the seeds off most everything else it is impossible to believe he chose to pass up the seeds of others. And they don't have to be cooked you can eat beans, peas and grains before they dry out on the plant.

There are plenty of dichotomies in this diet. Wine, coffee, chocolate and dairy are fine even though we know for a fact Paleo man did not eat/drink any of them. The biggest problem with it in my opinion is that the people who came up with it are not hunters or foragers. There isn't even any real emphasis on eating mainly wild and foraged foods. They throw a bone that direction but that's about it. Everything at the grocery store today is a modern invention. All the fruits and vegetables and fats and meats are the products of 10,000 years of agriculture. If you really wanted to eat like Grok you would be eating dandelions out of your front yard and killing and eating the squirrels in your bird feeders.

I am not saying the diet is bad at all though. I think it is good and I am following it pretty strictly. But I am working in the occasional ancient grain or chickpea here and there because I have no doubt Grok ate them. And I am putting my emphasis on wild game and foraged greens because they have far more nutritional value and I also know it is the closest thing to what our ancestors ate.

Stick with basic animal products and vegetables for most of your meals. Cut out anything refined, processed, or having ingredients you can not pronounce. Add in small amounts of other things like fruit, nuts, dairy (if you are eating that), etc. At times, try removing something from your diet to see how it makes you feel when you readd it. If you feel good - eat it. If it makes you feel bad - don't eat it.

In my opinion, paleo is a conceptual ideal - how you implement it is totally up to you.

(that may not be the overwhelming view, but it is working for me)

I wouldn't call the forefathers (and mothers) of Paleo merely "writers and bloggers". More like, really smart scientists. Read them.

Don't feed the trolls.

I have seen the following reasons to not eat legumes: 1. It has lectins and anti-nutrients. 2. They need extensive cooking to be edible. 3. First evidence of farming is 6k years ago.

Unfortunately I don't find these arguments to fit the axiom of eat like a paleo man.

Number 1 is based on health benefits, not a bad criterion, but not exactly an ideological reason.

Number 2 The most current evidence is that cooking is 1.8 million years old, which puts it squarely in the paleo time frame, so i find the need for cooking unconvincing.

Number 3 is the most compelling, but just because legume farming started 6k years ago, does not mean they were not eaten before. I think it implies that they were at least eaten sparingly shortly before farming, but then again 6k and paleo are rather disparate.

For more Paleo Diet hacks: With out taking the word of the writers and bloggers, how can I determine for my self what foods are Paleo?

Paleo is sort of a lens to look at something with.

So for legumes, sure, they probably did eat them way back when. But did they base their entire diet on them? Would they have selected legumes over meat? Why or why not?

Perhaps one reason why not is that the preparation of them is time-consuming and the reward is a food that doesn't produce optimal health and vitality nor a good calorie to work ratio. Legumes are not a complete food. Most vegetarians know this.

Perhaps another reason is that meat is always available no matter what the season and it contains fat and a greater concentration of vitamins, minerals and protein than legumes. It can be eaten raw, cooked or dried. Beans take relatively more processing.

Perhaps a reason why they might choose legumes over meat is that meat wasn't available. If it promoted better health, they'd probably choose legumes over meat and you wouldn't be wondering why legumes are not at the top of some blogger's list of healthy paleo foods. You'd be asking why not meat.

Of course, they would not have known about protein or lectins or anything like that back then. That's what our science tells us now. They would have just noticed that it's good to eat foods that make you healthy, promote having healthy offspring and are easy to get at.

If you see paleo as a lens these things are a little easier to see.

I recommend reading Weston A. Price's book. He went out to investigate pre-modern cultures back in the 1930s. You can see some of the wisdom of these pre-modern people that is now pretty much lost to us moderns. You can read the whole thing online here: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html

Time machine is the only surefire way to know.

Who cares what was eaten 5, 10, 20 thousand years ago? Honey was, but I am not touching it. Insects also, blech!

I keep asking my butcher if he has any wooly mammoth and he just looks at me funny.

I mean, seriously, whether or not a bean was eaten by my forebears, really says very little about whether I should.

Consider all the evidence and test things for yourself. The only things I'm more or less convinced of are that refined flours, sugars and veg oils are pretty bad. Some beans, like soy, kidney and peanuts are not so good (for me anyways).

I like things like cod liver oil, coconut oil, and pastured butter. None of that is "paleo". Again, who cares. If it works and makes sense, that's what matters.

I think the most convincing argument I've heard is Paleo's emphasis on optimal, non-inflammatory digestion. From a sci. literature standpoint, there are many conflicting studies, including those that show preparing soy both lowers antinutrients and keeps them the same.

Until there is conclusive evidence on whether preparing grains/legumes/nuts lowers the antinutrients to zilch, we only have our own bodies to listen to. As a healthy person, you're not necessarily going to detect inflammatory reactions to food (even low-grade inflammation) but you might want to consider trying a 30-day elimination diet by eating the paleo staples during that time and then reintroducing one grain/legume/nut at a time to see if it causes a reaction.

If you're interested in this (and the reason you might be is because autoimmune patients have much more pronounced immune reactions to everything, including food so they might serve as a canary in the coalmine), I wrote a blog with some statistics with doctors' reports on how patients with a wide range autoimmune illnesses do with paleo and primal diets. You can read it here: blog.healclick.com/paleo-primal-scd-gaps/

From a personal standpoint, as a patient actively involved in the autoimmune illness community for over 6 years, the two helpful changes I hear most about from other patients are 1) going to a paleo/primal diet and 2) low-dose naltrexone. You can take that FWIW of course.