I don't think the article was entirely fair. In fact I thought it was contrived and left out so much as to make it a pointless waste of time. De Vany has his theories as does Wolfe and Sissons and they make sense. It seems that De Vany style of writing on this point has always been 1st person in nature and to complain about it now is like complaining about the uniform after joining the army.

I did try to bring his products G1, G2 & G3 to the UK. First of all he said that we would have it same price as the USA, then later back tracked and said he couldn't possibly sell for the same price to the UK as USA. Bear in mind the products come from Europe. And he put up all the prices in line with the shipping the UK customers were paying already, something I was trying to avoid.

I questioned him on this (all correspondence via email) and said the UK customers won't like it and he's ignored me ever since.

He thinks I'm too low in the paleo hierarchy to question his actions me thinks.

He also tried to delete and lock comments on his forum that he felt were below his level of 'understanding' for a while or that had been asked before at some point which I though was egotistical and so did some others. He denied this though when I put this to him.

He is an egotistical prat as far as I can make out from my online interactions with him. Consistently bringing himself up in virtually every comment he makes about his spin on paleo, quite tedious eventually.

Such stupid stuff. Wait until you are interviewed by a deceptive journalist, if one ever feels they might wish to interview you.

Try this, when you are 75 get back to me.

To my knowledge, the entire paleo argument revolves around the difference in health between hunter-gatherers and agrarians. Hunter-gatherers: large, robust, powerful, flawless bone health, no signs of CHD, diabetes, etc. Agrarians: short, gaunt, sickly, poor bones.

The "our genes don't care if we live a long time as long as we have a lot of babies" argument is painful to read because it is basically asserting that there is no such thing as a biological diet for a particular animal. Oh really... So you wouldn't mind feeding your pet bunny rabbit a lamb chop? Apparently its genes don't change to adapt to different food sources so a lamb chop is as good for a rabbit as a carrot.

The paleo principle really should be stated as "We have only been eating grains and legumes in significant quantities for a limited amount of time, and there are toxic substances in them that we hypothesize might be pathological to humans since we might not have evolved methods of defense against them. We tested it and what do ya know? These foods are harmful to humans and increase inflammation"

The chronic cardio argument is actually invalid. Not that it is wrong that chronic cardio is unhealthy, but that is a necessity of physics, not biology. Long-distance running is demonstrably pathological.

Could we just say "grains practice kin selection and therefore manufacture poisons to kill animals for the benefit of their kin, and it is unhealthy to eat such seeds" and "long-distance running causes inordinate amounts of oxidative stress, raises cortisol, and damages organs"? Yeah we could do that. Although there is much wisdom to be garnered from the anthropological evidence and since nutrition is a subset of biology, and evolution is the default connecting principle of biology, perhaps we should start with the evolutionary stance when forming a hypothesis. Hypothesis being the key word in all of this. It just so happens that 90% of the time it turns out to beget the truth more often than not.

Devany is on his site today (yesterday?) attempting to explain Zen Buddhism in a one-page essay. Pretty much stating that he can sum up both Zen AND Taoism in two or three paragraphs.

If THAT is the level of scholarship he's applying to nutrition, then I'm very dubious of his advice, to say the least.

De Vany estimates the waist-to-hip ratios of early humans based on the waist-to-hip ratios of modern athletes (p. 27), which is pretty speculative, to put it politely and diplomatically. De Vany argues that it is not entirely our fault we are fat, because we are genetically programmed to be lazy overeaters (p. 92), but also suggests that, though the stigma currently is maladaptive, our propensity to judge obese people too harshly probably evolved as an adaptation "during evolutionary times, when obesity was rare and almost surely indicated that that person was taking more from the group than they were contributing to it" (p. 179). In the absence of any attempt to identify the genes and biochemical pathways that are responsible for the obesity stigma, I'm afraid this speculation is what Stephan Jay Gould and others would have referred to as a "just so story" rather than science.

DeVany's book in a nutshell. Thank you, Chris Masterjohn, for that book review. (http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Art-De-Vany-New-Evolution-Diet-Review.html)

My friend Cami says she signed up for his blog and every question anyone asks usually end up with him bragging on himself in the response.

Paying subscriber: "My C-reactive protein is high, Art. What do you think I can do?"

Art: "Mine is lower than an 18 year old's. People are amazed by me."

Ha Ha, Neil Bernard. Right.

For everyone who doesn't know, Dr. Neil Bernard is a leading advocate for pro-vegan, anti-anything else thinking.

http://www.nealbarnard.org/

Art's fascination with all things Art is a drag. I couldn't believe all of the pictures he had of himself on his site. Then, when he was putting his book together, he asked his readers to help him choose from an extensive portfolio of pictures; which ones would be best for his new book.

Here is something that I'm shocked that no one ever brings up:

I have 2 diet books from the 90s wherein the author's personal story is exactly the same as Devany's supposed story. I.E., scientist has wife become diabetic and sets out on his own to independently research the research on nutrition and on his own discover the true way to eat. I'm not at home right now and the title and author of one of the books slips my mind, but the other one with the exact same supposed back story is Beyond the Zone by Brian Peskin.

Peskin has been busted for fraud by some state's attorney general office, by the way.

It's all quite coincidental, wouldn't you say? Guy's wife gets diabetes and the guy sets off as a maverick investigator to find the truth and comes up with his diet.

I view him as a very loud n=1 experiment.

He speaks for himself, and not for me.

I am happy with the new things I have learned about how I can be healthy.

Art can neither encourage or discourage me, he is not in my tribe.

He is in his own diatribe. (heh)

Any publicity is good publicity. It's nice to get a write up at all. The article is crappy. Uninformative, judgmental. It's looking at individuals rather than robust ideas. It uses Art in the same way TV reporters use "the man on the street." But Art does concern me though. He seems to be drifting more towards low carb and away from paleo. Chris Masterjohn's recent write up on Art's book was pretty spot on.

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Art-De-Vany-New-Evolution-Diet-Review.html

Unfortunately, there is so much potentially harmful dietary advice in this book that it could prove to be a step down from the Standard American Diet depending on how it is executed. Many people may begin throwing egg yolks and chicken skin away, rather than cutting out the white bread or starting high-intensity interval training. Some may suffer harm from these changes and others may just find a low-fat, low-carb diet impossible to stay on.

I pay him no attention and haven't once I figured out he is only about himself and has become a tad senile. Sorry all you Art lovers but he is past being useful.

I think it is misguided to follow our ancestors. An 800 year old Inuit mummy was found to have extensive atherosclerosis.

Just doing sprints does NOT cut it.

I tend to not take things like this too seriously. It is pretty apparent that this "journalist" had a point of view and an opinion he wanted stated when sat down to write this article. I am all for dissenting opinions and as a poli sci major, I embrace discussion on all topics. However, to pick out certain pieces of the paleo argument, misinterpret them, and then poke holes in them, seems pretty juvenile. Of course, a quick google search under her name shows a pretty strong lack of objectivity in most of her writing.

Let's be honest the whole article was nonsense and it seems plenty of 'paleo' people were misquoted. The comments after the article on the web site are quite revealing. I would say we don't need a leader - for me paleo is about finding out the 'truth' for myself through thorough research rather than following a set of ideas. Mark Sisson, Robb Wolf, Kurt Harris - they all disagree on some things whilst agreeing on others - it's up to me to draw my own conclusions. Instead of teaching kids at school about healthy eating schools should be teaching kids how to recognize bad science and how to deconstruct media texts - too many people believe what they read regardless of where it comes from and rely on others - the government, doctors, the media to tell them what to eat and what to think. The writer of the article was only interested in a controversial spin and if any non-paleo people were to ask me about it (unlikely - no-one reads Time) I'd just tell them to take no notice of it. We don't have a consensus about what life was like 40,000 years ago, no-one can know but we can think about and explore the implications of evolution on us as individuals. I'm not interested in what results in maximum reproduction - clearly agriculture does an excellent job there - I'm interested in optimum health and longevity for me as an individual.

I wouldnt worry about anyone's reactions to the article because no one reads Time magazine.

'And our genes don't care how healthy we are as long as we reproduce. "Natural selection is about how many children you have and how many children they have," Lieberman says. "From an adaptation perspective, people today are doing just fine. There are several billion of us."'

facepalm

Having 7 billion people on the planet might mean humanity is doing fine, but it doesn't tell you anything about how individuals are doing. The reasoning in this article is just terrible.

I don't like his stance on fat. Also he sounds like a bit of a knob. Credit where credit's due but I read an article where he was boasting to the reporter about how he gets his wife screaming so hard the neighbours complain. WOAH Art, WAY to much information.

I haven't seen a mainstream media piece on paleo that I have liked, so I was kind of "meh" on this one, too. It brought up a bit more than the typical "look at this wacky fad--it's like the meat cookie diet or something!" or "club your lady and drag her in the cave!" bs (barely) so it may entice a few more people to check it out, which is good.

If people haven't seen John Durant's take on it yet, it's worth checking out: http://www.hunter-gatherer.com/blog/how-media-sensationalizes-paleo

Instead of wasting time talking about exercise, it's far more constructive to make every paleo conversation with the uninitiated about how wheat, fructose, industrial seed oils etc. are killing them.

That being said, I think De Vany is a great example of what you can do with 20-some years of low carb. There aren't too many examples of older people who have done this. In fact, I can't think of any other ones.

I would, however, like to read about these 3000 adaptations.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Mahatma Gandhi

That is the way, history, almost always, repeats itself.

The comments were encouraging.

Gossip, but according to sources that were actually there during the interview, things got kind of heated. I can imagine Jennifer felt a little like I did after De Vany was an asshole to me. I wish I had been there, but I didn't want to deal with the drama. The best thing I can say about him these days is at least he looks good. That's all the media cares about really. It's been disillusioning for me to hear him reject debate and just act like a jerk.

And the media gets what they deserve since they only want to portray uber-alpha males as the faces of this diet. Duh they are going to be difficult. At this point I've been involved with TV/Print reporters enough to know that I'm always going to get cut from pieces because I don't fit that paradigm. Doesn't really bother me personally since I am involved with academia again and don't want to be outed to my professors, but I'd still rather see someone like Sisson as the face of paleo.

I think the problem you are sighting is that there is no clear leader here in the Paleo Community. Maybe Art de Vany isn't the man for all, if not, who should it be? Is there a high carbohydrate / low fat forum that has a similar leader like figure? Is there a need for a celebrity face? hm.... do we really need a leader figure anyway?

I see your point of frustration, Jake, but Devany is only a spokesman for his book and blog. When directing your friends and loved ones to information on this paleo/primal/evolutionarily based lifestyle, you'll just have to work around the info you agree or disagree with. It's frustrating, though, and the explaining you may end up doing, may help to steer you to some new understanding as well.

It bothers me not. I have seen an amazing transformation in myself and the others who have given the Paleo lifestyle a try. I have never been in better shape, or happier in my life. While I do think more people being properly nourished etc is better for humans in general, it does not matter to me if it is popular, trendy, or accepted as/by the mainstream.