To Ben from Park Slope, you have no idea what the book is, you obviously haven't read it. You know nothing about Art Devany. Your apparantly afraid to research beyond your own personal bias. Art Devany has been a student of this lifestyle for 30 years. He is an economist with a degree in mathmatical sciene and has applied his research ability and his academic background to this subject. I would challange you to join Mr. DeVany's sight ($30 annually), and challange his knowledge directly. If your not willing to do that, don't challange Mr. Devany's knowledge with regard to the subject.

Ben you have no idea what this book is about since you obviously haven't read it and the scient behind it. Go to you tube, search for the Diet Wars, this is presentation done by a PhD in nurtrition at Standford who is a vegitarian. Your obvously biased toward vegitarianism. Man was not made to be purely vegitarian, that is a complete falsehood.

Nutrition: Its so easy an economist can do it! Much like Backster and the Secret Life of Plants, De Vany is leveraging his academic credentials to appear as an expert in a field outside of his training. This is total pseudoscience.

As usual for diet discussions, this one was also limited to "carbohydrates" vs. proteins. As some others have commented, simple carbs and easily-digestible carbs (e.g., potatoes) are a problem. Complex carbs are vastly different.

I have stuck to the Ornish vegan, complex carb diet for 3 years. At 53, healthy and eating a "good" diet, I had slightly elevated cholesterol, blood pressure, and weight. The Ornish diet dramatically all of these (including cholesterol ratios and individual species significantly improved).

I think it's significant to note that both the Ornish and Atkins diets, while diametrically opposed on animal protein, agree that simple carbs should be eliminated.

In "Good Calories, Bad Calories" my take was that the author also concluded that simple carbs are a major cause of blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and even cancer problems.

I encourage those interested in this diet, or suspicious of it, to do their own research and also take the book out of the library. There's a fair degree of science which shows low little our genes have changed over time. Think about it this way, Only about 1/5 of the planet isn't lactose intollerant. We don't always recognize that because the US includes a lot of genes from those who made that adaptation.

Regarding @Ben's comments (I think he also called in), the "psuedoscience" term is the pot calling the kettle black. These claims about how humans were "designed" (actually a more appropriate term would be "selected" as in natural selection) to be vegetarians are based on these long-running myths (some of which I read about 20+ years ago) popularized by Fit for Life. They are simply incorrect, or only partially. Devaney (nor other advocates of diets that include pleanty of animal protein) claim that humans are carnivores. They aren't, they are omnivores and our physiology shows this. We don't have as short of an intestine as a lion, but neither do we have multiple stomachs like cows. Our teeth include both ones that are good for grinding AND those that are more useful for tearing. Before the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry, so if you believe that we were not selected for eating animal protein, then by extension you probably think that we were essentially vegans 50,000 years ago. Yet today, no modern hunter gatherers that we've discovered are vegan. A few are vegetarian, but none are vegan. As far as "not a snowballs chance in hell of outrunning prey" that's not exactly correct either! Humans have been shown to have a great deal more long-distance indurance because of how their physiology sheds heat - through sweating primarily - and this allows them to "outrun" prey who can run very fast but eventually get overheated to the point where they basically can't function, and can't run away.

And then there's the whole advent of cooking and how it changed us and our diet. It came about hundreds of thousands of years ago, thus allowing much more time for adaptation to occur. I'm interested in weather DeVaney talks about this in his most recent book, since there was a recent book on the subject...

Thanks Mr. DeVany for your work - you are a great ambassador.

Listeners - if it sounds strange to you to feed yourself on meat and vegetables, primarily, that's merely evidence of how deranged our diets have become.

Eating this way works.

Greatest show ever! I am order the book now. I sent this link to all my family members. I have been living this diet for 15 years, and see the miracle happened to my body. Now, finally I can tell others, it is the right choice. My great grand uncle is Herbal medicine doctor, and I have learned this kind of diet from him when I was very young. Bring more show like this in the future. Who does not want to find a healthy way of live a quality long life?

Brian, this was a disappointing segment. For someone of such demonstrable intelligence, you seem to fail at ably steering your show through topics of science.

If you want to do a fad diet show and feature a muscular 75 year-old, then do just that. But to base this thing around a nonsense pseudoscientific theory just makes your research team look bad.

Specifically, his theory is a joke. The human body was "designed" by evolution to eat vegetables, not meat. That's a fact. Other carnivores (dogs, cats, etc.) have sharp claws for hunting, sharp teeth for the attack, and digestive tracts that are almost a straight shot, not a winding colon as humans do. (This is why humans have high incidence of colon cancer -- meat putrifies in our winding gut.)

Humans have teeth for mashing plants, winding colons like horses and cows, and not a snowball's chance in hell of outrunning a deer or other prey.

We are, in fact, unique amongst the animal kingdom in that we are the only creature that successfully hunts because of the power of our brains, not the power of our bodies/legs/teeth/claws/etc. Without tools, you'd barely stand a chance against a cow.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't eat meat. That's up to the eater. It just means that our bodies never evolved to eat meat. So this guy's argument that we need to "get back to what our caveman bodies are designed to do" is total malarkey, and any anthropologist worth their salt could have told you this.

Worse yet, a caller made this exact point in mid-segment and you pretty much ignored him.

So he's 70, 80, 90, who cares?! Just don't pitch his book as science. It's a diet book.

Brian, this was a disappointing segment. For someone of such demonstrable intelligence, you seem to fail at ably steering your show through topics of science.

If you want to do a fad diet show and feature a muscular 75 year-old, then do just that. But to base this thing around a nonsense pseudoscientific theory just makes your research team look bad.

Specifically, his theory is a joke. The human body was "designed" by evolution to eat vegetables, not meat. That's a fact. Other carnivores (dogs, cats, etc.) have sharp claws for hunting, sharp teeth for the attack, and digestive tracts that are almost a straight shot, not a winding colon as humans do. (This is why humans have high incidence of colon cancer -- meat putrifies in our winding gut.)

Humans have teeth for mashing plants, winding colons like horses and cows, and not a snowball's chance in hell of outrunning a deer or other prey.

We are, in fact, unique amongst the animal kingdom in that we are the only creature that successfully hunts because of the power of our brains, not the power of our bodies/legs/teeth/claws/etc. Without tools, you'd barely stand a chance against a cow.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't eat meat. That's up to the eater. It just means that our bodies never evolved to eat meat. So this guy's argument that we need to "get back to what our caveman bodies are designed to do" is total malarkey, and any anthropologist worth their salt could have told you this.

Worse yet, a caller made this exact point in mid-segment and you pretty much ignored him.

So he's 70, 80, 90, who cares?! Just don't pitch his book as science. It's a diet book.

My husband and I exercise and try to maintain a healthy diet. As we get older we exercise more ! I watch all the young people at work and all they consume is fast food and Junk food. As a nation we are making such poor dietary choices . Anything resembling the caveman diet would be more desirable !My husband's dad is in his eighties and is lean and in good shape,he eats a sound diet but has had a piece of coffiecake every morning for the past 50 years ... This leads me to the conclusion ,that having coffee cake on a regular basis creates longevity !

I look about 10-15 years younger than my age of 52, and might look even more youthful except for the distinguished silver in my hair (of which I have a lot, but for which I credit no diet). I've been on a rotation diet for severe allergies for about 12 years now--for the last 10, stretched to eating no single food more often than every 12 days, and some less often. So I've got probably 75-80 foods in my diet. Coincidentally, this is about the portfolio a gorilla dines on in the wild. Since prehistoric man did not farm, he was strapped by serendipity to a diet of what was blooming or growing at the time. She would gorge on the new tubers for a few days, and then not expect to have any more until the next season. Hence, food allergy and its consequent inflammation and associated illnesses never developed. Paleoanthropologists have discovered that the health of hunter-gatherer peoples who adopted agriculture (i.e., meaning the excessive, daily eating of staple foods) deteriorated markedly within 100 years of the adoption.

I have to think that my diet has something to do with my good luck.
I would think Mr. De Vany's diet would work as well--but I would also rotate my foods to gain extra benefit. Four to five days between single foods for most people is enough.

P.S. I have a few muscles . . . I guess I have to work harder.

Times had changed! and our world and water is contaminated. Not so sure why salmon raised on GMO corn diet is better for you....or other fish swimming in waters with agro-toxic residuals......Simple carbs NO, COMPLEX carbs YES, they include vegetables. Grains refer to rice, corn, and wheat, but there are superior ones, and most people eat processed foods made with only those three. Terrible to follow a diet just to look "hot" not to conquer diseases. My dad is 85 looks a bit younger had never done exercises but still plows the snow

I agree with the premise that we should hew to a hunter-gatherer diet since that is what we evolved to eat. Having said that, isn't a such a diet based largely on mostly plants, with meat eaten after it was acquired after a perhaps exhausting, calorie depleting hunt? Isn't it presumptuous to think that our ancestors feasted on meat every day at every meal? It appears that modern hunter-gatherers subsist on mostly plant food, supplemented by meat when they can get it. Not every hunt is successful. It seems the paleo diet is based on an idealized view of men as hunters. As such, it seems way too much meat is included in this diet.

This diet was developed for Type 1 diabetics? Okay, but we’re not all diabetic and Type 1 is an autoimmune disorder, unlikely to be related to diet. Overweight Americans losing weight on some diet does not confer some sort of dietary superiority either. That's just fat people losing weight, hardly meaningful to people who never became overwieght in the first place.

Okay, Arthur is into bodybuilding. If you work out in a dedicated manner, chances are that you will have muscles too. Nothing really all that shocking or directly related to some dietary perfection. Eric Phelps, though younger, is pretty buff too and he admits to eating fast food and other junk. Jack LaLane is 97 and in decent shape for a near centenarian and has followed a plant-based styled diet for decades.

We don’t need to dig into the patchy fossilized relics of prehistory to figure out how to eat.

National Geographic listed the longest-lived people in the world in their Blue Zones round up. It wasn’t statistical correlation, lab experiments, or speculation, just find the most centenarians in a location that can be verified with genuine documents (not looking at their teeth or whatever) and see how they live, that’s as straight forward as you can get.

All of the people with the highest amount of centenarians break paleo rules by eating grains (rice, bread, noodles), beans (soy beans, a food that is currently being maligned lately), potatoes, maybe dairy, and in a few instances, not so much meat if any.

Not all the Blue Zone groups were vegetarian, nor does one need to be vegetarian for good health, but it’s important to note that the longest lived population on the North American continent are the mostly vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists. They don’t live in distant times or in remote parts of the world, and while active, they aren’t all bodybuilders. They live in California, own televisions, drive cars, and shop at grocery stores and lead lives that are fairly easy for any American to emulate.

Paleo isn’t hard science, it makes some decent speculations, but quickly reveals itself to be socially biased scientism; projecting from a nostalgic noble savage view of pre-civilization humans and running with it despite any evidence to the contrary.

But hey, if it helps a few people finally figure out how to discriminate against junk foods with some simplistic “What would Grok eat? “ mantra, (picking and choosing things that don't have much factual basis in actual paleolithic conditions), I guess, it’s not all bad, it’s just the underlying theory isn’t supportable.

he's around 70 years old.

I cut out most of the grains from my diet and feel a lot better; I was influenced by a combination of (1) remembering that the digestive acids that digest proteins cannot digest starches and the acids that digest starches cannot digest protein and thinking just because our bodies have evolved to digest both does not mean we should eat both at the same time, (2) realizing that the bread fed to the fish and other wildlife at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens by visitors was giving them diabetes (the garden has since disallowed the practice) and that it was me sleepy and may be related to water retention and (3) noticing animals never eat such a buffet of different foods at one time but make a meal of one thing. I think we need to eat smaller portions of fewer types of food at any one time. I do not have diabetes in the family.

In response to other comments:
DVD from NYC says "My educated eye tells me your guest looks his age from the neck up ..." but how do I know if hes educated eye is blind or not since he never commits to a specific age;

Annie from nyc says "Has no one heard about The China Study? This is a scientific study unlike Mr. De Vany's theories. It indicates that much of our Western culture's common health problems like heart disease, cancer and others are simply not prevalent in those in cultures eating a very low protein diet ..." but this does not address the real difference between the American diet and not only the Chinese and "Eastern" in general but also western Europe ... our portions are huge;

gil x. fox from Edison, New Jersey says that she eats a "slow digesting" diet of high-quality protien, sprouted beans, and raw fruits n vegetables... but raw fruit digest the fastest of all foods.

My educated eye tells me your guest looks his age from the neck up; the head area with hair aided by topical applications, face absent the collagen that adds to a youthful appearance. As to muscle enhancement, professional athletics have revealed how that may be induced.

Estelle of Austin Comment is correct:"...vegetables and fruits have carbohydrtes..." it's "refined' carbohydrates "(highly processed foods)are the issue.

I agree with above posters who made comments about this (I nearly got to say it myself on air before the program ended).

It's a complete misconception to think that evolution ended 40,000 years ago before the advent of agriculture, especially if you consider how adaptive it was to have a large family post-agriculture to maintain the family farm! Those with larger families did better because of the large families, and there were then lots of kids to go pass on their "big family farm" genes.

While I agree with many that have commented on the silliness of returning to some perfect diet that existed in the past, yet it is important to remember that his approach is infused by the family history of diabetes. Of course he would gravitate to this type of diet. What is striking is what no one has commented on. He's totally buff because he works out all the time. What is lost in our modern society is exercise -- the continual exercise that our ancestors had just in the process of trying to survive. My then 9 year old son was training for a black belt when I was 51, I started martial arts myself. My arthritis and sinus allergies have almost disappeared, my posture is improved and I feel so much younger now.

Has no one heard about The China Study? This is a scientific study unlike Mr. De Vany's theories. It indicates that much of our Western culture's common health problems like heart disease, cancer and others are simply not prevalent in those in cultures eating a very low protein diet.

How about "metabolic typing".? Being of Swedish/Irish decent, I have found my body "works best" (and stable glucose levels) by eating a "slow digesting" diet of high-quality protien, sprouted beans, and raw fruits n vegetables...
I am a mesomorph..other body types seem to need more carbohydrates.
I advocate simply "nutrient-dense" food..trying to get 1gm protien per pound of body weight daily..and no dairy or sugar.

The name "Caveman Diet" is unfortunate; it's kind of a turnoff because it sounds quackish.

I just skimmed a little bit online about it, and it actually sounds quite varied and sensible.

One point, though: vegetables and fruits have carbohydrates; they don't reside only in grains.

perhaps Mr. De Vany should take a few courses in evolution and biology. Evolution did not stop 40,000 years ago. Humans evolved the ability to digest lactose (cows milk) fairly recently. This is not a scientifically supportable argument he is making. Its another fad.

67

I'd say Arthur is 62-65. Hard to really tell, since his face isn't prominently featured.

Jason Brougham is right.

I'm willing to accept that a high protein diet works, and that the current diet of modern westerners is not optimal, but I'm not sure the evolutionary theory necessarily follows. Humans are always evolving--even today. It is not something that happened and then stopped a long time ago.

To Carl,

Sure, our "caveman" ancestors lived relatively short lives compared to ours for various obvious reasons. Fighting animals is risky work. You break a bone and you are pretty much finished. Same when your teeth went, or you caught arthritis. Of course, infant mortality was high for many reasons.
So, I don't think it was the diet that kept their lives relatively short, but the risky lifestyle, for which there was no alternative until the miracle of agriculture was discovered, along with the domestication of animals..

This premise is ridiculous. Just because we ate other foods before the agrarian society, it doesn't mean that the post-agrarian diet is worse, especially in terms of the consumption of meat. Captive animals which don't eat their natural diet typically have a longer lifespan than their wild counterparts, even accounting for the harder lifestyle that the wild animals have.

i say he's between 55-60 years old

He's 84.

Ask about raw food, people picked what was around and ate it, without cooking. this is absurd. His views are dangerous. also, northern europeans lived in caves, not most of the world, that is a racist premise.

I've been been eating like a "caveman" for nearly a dozen years, ever since reading _Neanderthin_ by Ray Audette and Troy Gilchrist, and have yet to even had a sniffle, never mind any serious illness.

Whatever our diets - from either plant or animal sources - our modern cultures have added so many toxins worldwide, that we cannot compare our diets to those who lived in preindustrial times.

This brings to mind a New Yorker cartoon, which I'll describe since I can't upload it here. Two cavemen are sitting in a cave, looking concerned. One of them says: "Something's just not right -- our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty."

Low-carbohydrate diets, whether they be called the "Atkins" diet, or the "caveman" diet or South Shore, or whatever name, are indeed similar to the low carb, high protein diet that our hunter/gatherer forbears lived. THere were no fat hunters.
It was only with the advent of agriculture and the development of wheat and rice, was a stable and steady supply of carbohydrates realized. But as long as work was long and hard, and people worked off the stored calories, the dependency on bread and other grown sources of carbohydrates did not materially affect weight. But with the creation of a more leisurely class whose existence was not dependent on strenuous work, we have the beginnings of the development of the phenomenon of obesity.
Again, there were no fat hunter-gatherers, as fat hunters catch no game, nor can fight off wild beasts for the carcasses of downed animals.

Recent evidence indicates that humans were consuming starchy plant roots, and grinding them into flour, for at least 30,000 years. Ground plant matter of this age has been identified in prehistoric Czech, Italy, and Russia:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/08/1006993107.abstract

Is Western anxiety regarding contemporary technology, culture and society such that we're retreating to our earliest origins for solace and diet advice? May I suggest a sequel: the single-cell organism diet.