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Old November 26th, 2015 #1
Karl Radl
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Join Date: Aug 2007
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Default The Jewish War on Paleo

The Jewish War on Paleo


In my recent article, 'Why the Paleo Diet keeps you Non-Kosher', (1) I touched very briefly on some of the anti-Paleo commentary that is out there on the web. When I dug into this a bit the other day I noticed a bit of a trend and if you are a regular reader of SC you'll probably have some idea what I mean by that. That said relax; I am not going to evangelize about diets and fitness, but rather I thought to make a couple of observations.

In the first place most of the objections to Paleo are made by people who, to be quite frank, aren't exactly the healthiest people in the world themselves. For example Dave Bry and Jason Wilson are hardly adonises, while Marlene Zuk is fairly trim even if she, to be blunt, looks like a female extra from Boris Pasternak's 'Fiddler on the Roof'.

You might say that is a little below the belt [pun intended] and irrelevant, but I'd disagree. If you are overweight, and I've been there so I do know precisely what it is like, you are likely to be rather snide and snarky about health-related ideas regardless of how factual they are in relation to the findings of the fields of nutrition and health.

The fact that Bry's article on Paleo in 'The Guardian' of 18th August 2015 (2) was so god awful that it took just six days for Mark Sisson, an expert in health and a former professional athlete as opposed to a chubby journalist with a deadline, to literally shred it. (3) So much so that, as Sisson points out, Bry was actually criticising Paleo for advocating between 100-150 grams of carbohydrates as a day and then cited a scientific article, which specifically stated that about 150 grams of carbohydrates a day was optimal against Paleo.

Oh and Bry also got quite spectularly caught lying through his teeth to fit his half-baked and generally unhinged anti-Paleo whinge. (4)

Meanwhile Jason Wilson's article from 'The Guardian' (noticing a trend here?) of 16th March is similarly hostile, (5) but attacks Paleo as being 'evil' not because of the science, but because those who advocate a Paleo lifestyle don't 'just want us to cut down on processed carbs and grains, they’re dedicated to a selective denial of modernity, which in some cases is accompanied by anti-feminist attitudes.' (6)

Oh my... your diet and lifestyle choice is wrong, because... it is 'anti-feminist.'

But it gets oh so much better.

Apparently Paleo is an quasi-conspiratorial attempt to resurrect the (non-existent) patriarchy in Wilson's weird world (think in the vein of 'St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold').

Wilson states: 'In my view, the answer to that has little to do with food. The paleolithic is a favoured era because of the way it answers to a desire to justify or reimpose certain social hierarchies, especially those concerning gender.' (7)

Quite how you can think those sort of pseudo-intellectual brainfarts (to be rather generous) are coherent, let alone cogent, arguments I don't know, but apparently Jason Wilson does. I am slightly surprised though that Wilson didn't just go the whole hog and call Paleo a 'racist neo-Nazi revivalist' movement or some such bilge, but hey apparently he has a modicum of rational sense left even if it is evidently microscopic.

Indeed in an earlier hit piece, by Lars Eriksen in the edition of 'The Guardian' for 2nd March 2012, (8) the author is so desperate to undermine Paleo's credentials that he cites Cornell McClellan for the sole reason that he is (or was?) the personal trainer to President Obama.

That is pretty damned horrendous in terms of sourcing an argument against an empirically-based position such as a diet.

If you have evidence then you present it and if you don't then you should (quite frankly) cease your yapping.

It is evident therefore that the criticisms of Paleo by 'The Guardian' are primarily of an ideological, and not of a scientific, nature; in part probably because your average Guardian hack, like its readership I would wager, is on the political left, a passive vegetarian (if not a full blown vegan) and has a devotion to arguments that have a high emotional appeal and cater to a permanently outraged sense of morality.

But hey that could be my political bias talking as I am politically on the radical right and disagree with just about everything 'The Guardian' believes in and lobbies for. Unlike 'The Guardian' however I am quite open about the fact that I do have a dog in this fight.

Interestingly the anti-Paleo crusade by 'The Guardian' really only kicked into high gear in 2015 with the appointment of Katharine Viner to the role of 'Editor-in-Chief'. Viner is, you guessed it, of jewish origin. (9) She may not write the articles per se (those are done by 'male feminists' like Bry and Wilson), but it is her responsibility to set the tone of the publication and give it the proper direction so the anti-Paleo crusade can hardly be simply accidental.

Nor is it easy to write off the fact that the principle intellectual counter-blast to Paleo was also written by a jewess named Marlene Zuk (Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour at the University of Minnesota). (10) Zuk, like Bry and Wilson, tries to claim that 'science debunks Paleo', but as reviewers have noted: her version of Paleo is a complete straw man and she ends up (like Bry) in effect telling Paleo people to be go... well... more Paleo. (11)

Even though (predictably) Zuk garnered rave reviews from the sort of sciency people who think that 'piles of references' make a good argument (the first thing I was ever taught to do as a lowly undergraduate was check the claims in the references) and who apparently haven't read anything about Paleo other than what determined (and occasionally demented) critics claim. (12)

Her work is simply... well... a bunch of rubbish.

As Sisson summarizes it in a lengthy (and fairly brutal) demolition of Zuk's book:

'There are two main problems with the book, as I see it. First, she’s working against a straw man. Many of the arguments she debunks, like “eyeglasses aren’t paleo” or “the paleo diet was carnivorous,” seems to have been dug up from some random Internet commenter or drawn from fringe camps. In other words, they aren’t arguments people like Robb Wolf, Chris Kresser, Paul Jaminet, or me (or our readers) are making. Second, many of her counterarguments or “nuanced approaches” are the very same ones we’ve been exploring at length for years! After reading the book, John Durant tweeted “Paleofantasy shouldn’t have been a book in 2013, it should have been a blog post in 2010,” and that’s as good a description as I can think of.' (13)

Therefore as we can see the anti-Paleo camp is almost certainly motivated more by ideology than a dispassionate interest in nutrition (and there are quite a few valid criticisms of Paleo out there rather anti-Paleo left-wing hysteria is not an argument in and of itself).

When we note however that both the intellectual leader of the anti-Paleo hysteria (Marlene Zuk) and the 'Editor-in-Chief' (Katharine Viner) of the most aggressive anti-Paleo media outlet are jewish it starts to look like more than just a simple coincidence.


References


(1) http://www.semiticcontroversies.blog...on-kosher.html
(2) http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...ritics-science
(3) http://www.marksdailyapple.com/anti-...#axzz3sdnCJL5G
(4) Ibid.
(5) http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...ts-an-ideology
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...iet-copenhagen
(9) http://ukmediawatch.org/2010/07/29/k...e-mast-head-2/
(10) Cf. Marlene Zuk, 2013, 'Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live', 1st Edition, W. W. Norton: New York
(11) http://boingboing.net/2013/04/03/pal...anti-pale.html ; http://www.marksdailyapple.com/is-it...#axzz3sdnCJL5G
(12) https://www.sciencenews.org/article/paleofantasy ; http://www.salon.com/2013/03/10/pale...age_delusions/ ; http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...ex-diet-review ; http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...er-really-eat/
(13) http://www.marksdailyapple.com/is-it...#axzz3sdnCJL5G

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This was originally published at the following address: http://www.semiticcontroversies.blog...-on-paleo.html
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