The Pre-History of the Paleo Diet: Cancer in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Dr Loren Cordain describes himself as the 'world's foremost authority on the evolutionary basis of diet and disease' and as 'one of the world's leading experts on the natural human diet of our Stone Age ancestors' . 1 He is the self-proclaimed founder of the Paleo Diet Movement and champions a way of eating that mimics that of our hunter-gatherer forbears. As its online advocates perform their commitment to this arcane way of eating through the very modern mediums of blogging, Twitter and Instagram, the popular Paleo diet and its cousins seem closely tied to the peculiarities of the twenty-first century. And yet, the Paleo premise is not new. In 2014, Cordain published an article on his website, titled 'Breast Cancer and Other Cancers: Diseases of Western Civilization?' 2 In it, he claims that cancer was 'rare or non-existent in historically studied hunter gatherers and other less westernized peoples' . In support of this, he quotes various early-twentieth-century authorities, including the Nobel prizewinning physician Dr Albert Schweitzer, who wrote on his arrival in Gabon in 1913, 'I was astonished to encounter no case of cancer . . . This absence of cancer seemed to me due to the difference in nutrition of the natives as compared with the Europeans. ' 3 This quotation, which Cordain takes as near-irrefutable evidence, provokes him to insist at the end of the article, ' Any way you look at it, the Paleo Diet is a good remedy to prevent cancer. ' 4 It is unusual for someone positioning themselves as a contemporary scientific authority to make use of, and directly quote, historical sources -not as errors to be refuted but as evidence for their claims. What are not unusual, however, are the assumptions that underlie the cancer-preventing claims of the Paleo diet. It is a wellknown, if ill-supported, trope that cancer constitutes a 'pathology of progress' -an unintended consequence of modernity. Or, as Charles Rosenberg puts it, 'The notion that the incidence of much late-20th-century chronic disease reflects a poor fit between modern styles of life and humankind's genetic heritage. ' 5 His seminal article on 'the idea of civilization as risk' identifies a tendency on behalf of late-twentieth-century critics to point to the 'structured asymmetry between a body evolved in Paleolithic conditions and the late-twentieth-century environment in which that body must maintain itself ' . However, he suggests that the conventions of this argument -that the 'change from savage to settled rural and then to urban life brought with it conditions