Do we really have to change the name "Paleo"? I like the paleo name. If people want to misinterpret Paleo as some sort of historical re-enactment, that's THEIR problem. People will find fault with any name, especially if it challenges their beliefs and means they might have to change and stop eating baked goods and fizzy drinks. Neolithic foods are that addictive to people!! I'm proud, not embarrassed to call myself a Paleo eater. I love Paleo, what it stands for and how it's helped so many people. Intelligent people soon realise that we're not walking round in loin cloths and grunting at each other, it's just a base line to which current nutritional science is applied. Seriously if people want to look over the facts and what's important and just poke fun then they can "do one".
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I entirely agree, paleo is a completely acceptable name and now (that it has become the main label used by the community) is almost certainly the best one. Perhaps something based around 'evolutionary' would have been a less misleading term and made explicit the scientific rather than historic motivations of Paleo, but the moment where changing the moniker would have been beneficial has passed and, in any case, 'evolutionary' lacks a lot of the content that paleo does. (Do we think that humans have evolved enough for grains, dairy etc to be safe? And so on...) I don't really see the point of any rebrandings. The main problem that most people have with Cordain's paleo is the fact they think he got his conception of what-was-eaten-during-the-paleolithic wrong, not that they think we ought not to try to eat a diet based on what was available during the paleolithic. I also agree that the 're-enactment fallacy' is so obviously a mistake about what paleo means, that the onus is not on us to change our label to try to avoid people (unjustifiably) making this mistake. Our label 'paleo' just suggests that people ate a certain way in the paleolithic (the bulk of our evolution) and that this tells us something about what we think we ought to do now. If people think that the 'what we ought to do now' is 'eat precisely the same foodstuffs as were available during the paleolithic' and therefore object that "wooly mammoths went extinct, so your diet is impossible" then they're simply making an egregious error in their assumption about what paleo means. Assuming that is akin to assuming that the South Beach diet entails eating sand. We don't need to change the label to rule out such error. The correct response is: "That's stupid, paleo really means basing your lifestyle on conditions we adapted to during the paleolithic" not "Ah well, paleo was indeed about dressing like a caveman and pretending that certain foodstuffs were magical, rather than looking at their biological components, but now we've got a patch for that." |
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Rebranding Paleo http://paleohacks.com/questions/14999/rebranding-paleo#axzz1J1KrFJB0 How should we refer to Paleo folks? http://paleohacks.com/questions/741/how-should-we-refer-to-paleo-folks#axzz1J1KrFJB0 |
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I think that it could be damaging in some respects. A fad by definition is "An intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, esp. one that is short-lived; a craze." No sooner has 'paleo' gained widespread traction in the mainstream than it is changing. However, I reckon that if anyone can shift things on to a robust scientific footing, KGH can. Whether he can do it alone or not, I don't know - perhaps if a few of the paleo 2.0 luminaries teamed up, it would have more 'clout'. |
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Well, we arleady have a plethora of names: Paleo I actually have no problem with this (sorry if I forgot a few). Whatever brings people around to facing the science and making positive changes is a good thing. Some people will be averse to the "evolution thang" and may hook into something just based on health or basic science or just the excellent results. After all, that's what matters. So what if they are not "doing paleo". Frankly, it is my dream that the term Standard American Diet would come to mean "Real Wholesome Food". I think we are more likely to see even more splinters as various people try to cash in on the ideas by creating their own brands. I'm okay with that too - as long as we keep discussing the science and tweaking our practices for the better. I actually like to visit the non-paleo blogs to get ideas about what we need to change - or at least to hear the devil's advocate position so that we can sort out the truth - or at least think about it for a while until it can get sorted out. |
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I talk about my lifestyle and depending on who I talk to, I may use the term Paleo. Most often, I just explain what I eat and what I don't. I tell them why (leaky gut, antinutrients, etc.) I may explain inflammation. Some people are just put off by Paleo, particularly in a Christian community. |
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I don't expect any of the re-branding to take. As a whole, the term paleo gets attention and has been around for a long time. But most of the off-shoots are unlikely to reach any kind of critical mass without the intervention on the scale of Oprah/Huffingtonpost style dietary cheer leading. And that is probably very unlikely, so.... paleo it is. |
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I really don't see any problem with the name. I always thought it meant nothing more than dietary choices informed by the diet of ancestral humans, who evolved during the paleolithic. Even if there is some disagreement about "what's in, what's out," the name paleo seems quite apt. This name change issue seems to stem from a few prominent bloggers, who want to differentiate themselves from the crowd. |
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FWIW, I completely agree. Trying to enact some kind of change right now is silly. We're all more alike than we are different. I don't think it wise to create such schisms in such a small overall movement. We actually need to start consolidating resources and messages rather than fracturing and multiplying. As a movement, we have to be able to adjust and adapt, and we don't have to rebrand everytime there's a change. |
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I can understand why it is a good idea (imo) to evolve the brand. Paleolithic is a word that already has a well established meaning. Like it or not, the word invokes knapped stone tools and painted cave walls. The same day that I first saw the PaNu site changed, there was a report on a hispanic speaking channel talking about how one man lost considerable weight following the Paleo Diet (no beans, no grains, no dairy..all the meat you could want and some veggies). This is the first time I've heard anything on Paleo in the mainstream Hispanic media. The photo displayed as they talked about it was basically a primitive barrel-chested man, hairy, dirty and wearing some kind of loin-cloth. Of course, there was a nutritionist attacking "primitive diets", how they acquired food and health. In short, I think the term Paleolithic already has a well established meaning behind it that makes it far too hard to overcome. And in light that KH's view is as much science based as seeing what was eaten, the Paleolithic term in it's images of primitive technology, doesn't fit KH's model, imo. But, he was my introduction into the diet, so I'm probably always going to stand by him. |
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Actually, I think that this is a normal and healthy thing. You see it any time a small subculture experiences a large influx of new people and branching variations. Look around at the different "flavors" of Paleo floating around... no-carb Paleo, VLC Paleo, and the folks eating potatoes, rice, honey and fruit... carnivore, meat+dairy-no-veg, meat+veg-no-dairy... raw Paleo, grilling and smoking only Paleo, haute cuisine Paleo... organic-only Paleo, supplement-heavy Paleo... Neanderthal re-enactors, Paleo lifestylers, "Paleo as the Crossfit diet" folks... "Paleo" became an umbrella term for all of these variations by memetic chance. But everybody doing Paleo -- and especially everybody promoting a particular type of Paleo -- is trying to clearly express their version's identity. We're getting to a point where Paleo is becoming more recognizable due to its increasing popularity and media coverage, but the varieties are also becoming diverse enough that we know that when we talk to a friend about it, their exposure to Paleo is probably not the same as what we're doing. Our elevator speeches have been shifting over from a simple explanation of what we eat and why, to an awkward dance of distancing ourselves from one group and aligning ourselves with another... a weird apologia of identity: "I do Paleo, but it's not like this guy's Paleo or that blog's Paleo. Have you read this author? And I do this, but I think that is overrated/unnecessary/silly/dangerous." Anytime this happens, the schismatic rebranding comes next. It's why the term "vegan" took off: both the vegans and the vegetarians wanted a little distance from each other. And those groups have their sub-identities: ovo-lacto-vegetarians, raw vegans, fruitarians, etc. It's why there are different denominations of religions, for that matter. Different groups and individuals lean toward different practices and preferences. Once those differences become pronounced enough that people are fighting about it, they split off and rename things. |
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"What's in a name?, as the great George Fatpimple once said" (quote from an old British comedy series). Seriously though, I'm happy to use the term Paleo, or any other term, to describe my choice of diet/lifestyle as long as other non-Paleo people can understand the concept of eating good, healthy food and cutting the processed stuff (much like Deirdre's answer previously). This is not always easy to do since, unlike some of my friends, I do not (to my knowledge) have any medical issues, allergies or intolerances to justify my choice. I know I shouldn't have to feel guilty about my choice but valid medical reasons always help to justify things without too many questions. My only is issue is being overweight - always have been despite various diets, cycling, playing squash 2-3 times per week etc. Perhaps I do have undiagnosed intolerances that have stopped me losing the weight? Anyway, there are some people who will only accept my change of diet because I have managed to lose about 28lb in 2 months. All the usual arguments, "it goes against medical advice", "too much fat", and "be glad when you're back to eating normally" are regularly trotted out and, frankly, whatever name is applied to the brand is irrelevant if people don't wish to understand the concept. |
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I think there's more going on here than just trying to separate the "movement" from "reenactment." The term paleo, at its simplest, has meant "eating what paleolithic man ate." People might argue over what that diet included, but that's what the term meant. So dairy, potatoes, and legumes, for instance, whether or not they're good for you, are not paleo, by definition. Now many people are using the paleolithic diet as a starting point, but including neolithic foods that don't have any apparent harmful effects (at least for them) or which seem like they would have fit into the paleolithic diet if they'd been available back then. So butter fits, for instance, because it's a saturated fat, and the paleolithic diet included lots of saturated fat. If we were designed to eat animal fats and coconuts, we should be able to eat butter. But wheat simply can't fit, because it contains things that weren't in the diet at all back then. So we're sort of working two directions toward the middle: what do we know about the diet back then, and what's available to us now? How do we bring these two lists together to create the optimum diet? If you start at the paleo end and just add a few newer foods, "paleo plus" might seem like a good name. But if you start at the modern end, looking around the grocery store and eliminating the known harmful neolithic agents, you could end up with a similar cart-full of food without knowing a thing about paleolithic times, so a different name would make more sense to you. I also wouldn't minimize the effect that a popular book or two can have on a name. Sure, maybe Cordain doesn't "own" the word paleo, and he shouldn't be allowed to stamp it forever with his sat-fat-phobias. But that's life. Any low-carber knows what it's like to say, "I'm cutting carbs," and have people automatically go, "Oh, you're doing Atkins. Isn't that the bacon-and-lettuce diet, and didn't he die of a heart attack?" Never mind that there are dozens of other low-carb diet books out there; the one with the bestselling title (more precisely, what people were told about the book) defined the term. If a popular book has taken your favorite term and distorted it so the public thinks it means something it's not supposed to, you can fight an uphill struggle to get your term back, or you can move on and pick a new one. Besides, some "paleo" people are into reenactment, right down to how to use the toilet, and more power to them. They have as much right as anyone -- maybe more -- to claim the term for what they're doing. |
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