Garden of Eating Paleo Diet / Primal Diet on Livestrong.com!

Livestrong.com has put up a positive "review" of what they have called the "Garden of Eating Diet." I was surprised to find a positive review of my book on such a mainstream site.  Whoever wrote it went to the trouble of providing a section called "Clinical Data,"  which briefly reports the positive health outcomes found in the 10-day clinical trial run by Frassetto et al (Metabolic and physiologic improvements from consuming a paleolithic, hunter-gatherer type diet) using a plant-food dominated paleo-style diet.

One clear mistake in the review, however, lies in the author's assertion that I/we said that you must eat grass fed animal products to follow our recommendations.  We did not.  We gave many reasons we prefer grass fed animal products and highly recommended them, but we did not state that you must only eat grass fed animal products.  We didn't even do that ourselves, and still don't.  

The author also included this:

Warning

Speak with your doctor about the benefits and risks of the Garden of Eating Diet before you start it. You might have specific dietary needs that the program does not address, or your doctor may prescribe another dietary approach based upon your specific health needs.

I am always both irritated and amused by these warnings, since most doctors haven't a clue about the benefits or supposed "risks" of eating a practically paleo diet.   It also perpetuates the largely bogus idea that "specific health needs" require specific diets.   Like, you eat this way if you have diabetes, a different way if you have heart disease, and another way yet if you have M.S. or cancer, or whatever.   I agree only that once a person has been damaged by conventional "treatments," e.g. gall bladder removal, some modifications or adjustments or supplments may be required to work around the damage.  Otherwise the same set of foods applies to all humans and all conditions, although optimum food group proportions (more or less of meat or plants, for example) might vary from individual to individual or even within one individual from time to time.

Otherwise, humans are a single species, and like all other species we are most completely adapted to that set of foods upon which our evolutionary ancestors depended for the vast majority of human evolutionary time, namely those that form the foundation of a practically paleo diet, meat and meat products, vegetables, fruits and fruit products, and nuts and nut products.  As Robb Wolf has said, it is amazingly odd that we generally have no problem understanding the principle of dietary adaptation when discussing other species -- no one seriously believes that some cats are adapted to meat diets, and others to vegan diets -- but for some reason (I think it has to do originally with certain religious ideologies of Middle Eastern desert tribe origin) we treat the human as an odd snowflake not subject to the same biological forces as other species.