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There’s a great New Yorker cartoon – two cavemen, sitting in a cave, looking suitably homo habilis or something, all sloping foreheads and protruding jaw. The caption reads:
‘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.’
I think of it whenever someone trots out a living-close-to-the-soil, modern-lives-are-killing-us mantra about how we should stop eating cooked food or only wear natural fibres or whatever. Humans live longer, healthier lives now than wethey have at any other point in history (and that’s largely true wherever you live in the world), so if living like our ancestors is so great, how come they all died of diseases we don’t even have names for anymore?
The ‘Paleo’ diet was recently back in the news, this time because a study found that people who followed it were less likely to die of bowel cancer.
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