eventually, there's a LAST frontier

I've been reading yet another article bitching about how Paleo has gone to the dogs, and why That Guy is bailing.  Of course, I couldn't finish it -- it was full of smug self-righteousness and bullshit ... all perfectly true from his point of view but far from universal.  He couldn't have composed a better example of what I wrote about the other day.

All his actions do is muddy the nutritional waters.  He was one who had the influence necessary to help straighten out Paleo when it first started wobbling, but his own self-promotion was all that was really important after all....

That Guy complains that less-toxic forms of foodstuffs which the 20th-centurions have come to rely on are widely available now!  He seems to be of the opinion that ease of access spoils his Real Food Ancestral Lifestyle paradigm -- if you ain't spendin' hours in the kitchen you're doing what a friend of mine once called "Flintstones Reenacting*".  He bemoans the fact that SOME PEOPLE really need to limit carbs -- i'm sure he thinks there's no problem with ALL of us going out for a ten-mile run to burn off the sugar in the carrots THAT I SHOULD BE EATING EVEN THOUGH I DON'T REALLY LIKE THEM ... because they're Paleo-approved by some yoyo whose approach is not really Paleo.  [head.bang.desk]  He proclaims that since Chris Kresser says legumes are all right, well, by god they ARE, and EVERYBODY should be eating them because prebiotics! 

If we ain't doin' it his way, we ain't doin' it RITE, and by cracky, if we won't stop calling ourselves "also Paleo" he's gonna take his ball and bat (cricket, not baseball) and go out and start another exclusive club.

In other words, someone who's been profiting off the Paleo label for years now has no interest in FIXING what's wrong with it.  No, he's going to CONTRIBUTE to its corruption instead.  He's going to bad-mouth a template that the potential of doing a lot of good for a lot of people, just because he's tired of the drama. 

He's going to move into his new frontier and put a new name onto the "TPG version of Paleo," all the while making it actually useful to a smaller percentage of the modern-health-troubled population.  He's contributing to the littered landscape of "failed" dietary templates, all because too many people try to define "Paleo" too narrowly, and take it beyond what he thinks it should be.  Well, I hate to tell you, laddie, but if your style of "ancestral health" takes off, the same damned thing is going to happen to it.

Your disciples WILL bend your new template to suit their convenience!  You can be a purist yourself, and you can define your "movement" as broadly or as narrowly as you like, but what is perfect for you won't be perfect for ANYBODY else.  Not one.  Lifestyles and tastes, genetics and gender-differences are way too various to make ANY plan "one size fits all."  And in 20 years, your current "perfect" won't be perfect for you anymore either.

People give lip-service to the need for individualization (it's a libertarian thing), but to a great many of them it's a very uneasy dispensation.  Maybe younger high-carb paleoids are uncomfortable with the older low-carb types because they're seeing US as THEIR future?  Perhaps it's fear that causes them to push us away so strenuously?  If they can keep us out of sight and out of mind, they can hide the realization that if they live long enough they'll experience a gradual decline too?  After all, at thirty most of US were lean, active, and health-conscious as well....

Time will come when THEY can't do the amount of exercise they can now.  Eventually their hormone production will taper off, and they'll find that the "right" gut-bugs won't cure the accumulated damage.  Some day they'll find themselves on the extreme edge of the world with no new wilderness to retreat into.  They'll be scanning for a new frontier as they step into ever-deepening water.
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*  my old friend Julie was inspired by the sight of a really crummy "reenactor" wrapping a piece of burlap around a soda can -- I thought her analogy was brilliant.  :-)