> The Paleolithic diet is one of the dumbest ideas I've encountered in my entire life. Its followers tend to discount vast piles of medical research in favor of tiny experiments that suggest what they hope to be true. This kind of behavior is common for adherents of any fringe diet, but paleo goes a step further

While there is indeed a paleo re-enactment fringe that tries to live as they understand our ancient ancestors would, not just nutrition-wise, I find that there's actually a good bit of research-based and evidence-based thinking going over these "vast piles of medical research" you mention and finding that they don't really support the current accepted dogma of nutritional recommendations, and that indeed this research is pretty flimsy itself, if you were to believe Taubes, Lustig, Cordain, Eades, others, and tellingly now there is an alarming increase in obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases as an apparently direct result of the public by-and-large complying with common-wisdom "healthy" recommendations.

> Even its concept is flawed. Some things it discards, such as wheat are barely changed from what our ancestors were eating long before agriculture or town settlements

Oh? Wheat requires several months from cultivation to being ready for consumption. Perhaps it was consumed "long before agriculture or town settlements" but then it seems quite implausible that it would amount to anything significant in terms of nutrition, not to mention that it still requires quite a bit of processing before it can be eaten so it isn't exactly readily available nutrients.

But lets for a moment assume that yes, there have been many changes and genetic transformations to fruits, nuts, the meats we consume and ourselves. How is it unreasonable, given the catastrophic results of following current nutritional dogma, to look into our over 2 Million- year evolutionary history for clues on what we may be doing wrong, and noting that we've had agriculture for only 0.5% of that time. Even if after agriculture our rate of change multiplied 10-fold, we would still have a nutritional heritage of over 95% of our history where we most likely did not consume, in general, 60-80% of our nutrients from grains and certainly not from sugar, or refined vegetable oils.

That sounds like a pretty good clue to me.

> is rightfully considered a fad diet by the NHS and similar organizations

And then people all over are giving these ideas a go, and lo! they're feeling better, losing their excess weight, reversing chronic diseases, feeling energetic, not having hunger ups-and-downs, not feeling bloated, etc. (granted, this is all anecdotal evidence) And yet this is one of the dumbest ideas you've encountered in your entire life? You must be pretty lucky having a life of plentiful great ideas.

> It's also horribly unsustainable. A hummer-driving vegan...

There was the shadow of a reasonable argument there. It is entirely possible that given our current population of over 6 billion people, not all of us could follow the exact same diet, then again, there's no reason why anyone would suggest that. A good 1/5th of earth's population does not eat cattle for cultural reasons, cattle is not the only meat, and it can be raised sustainably (while being more nutritious), and there are other good sources of the necessary nutrients from the paleo perpective, and the needs of a male vary from those of a female, from a baby, from a child, from youth to middle age to old age, from summer to winter, from health to injury to fertility vs infertility, from athletes to sages, etc. There's plenty of wiggle room for me to believe that it is indeed sustainable.

Sorry for the long post.