THE PALEOLITHIC PRESCRIPTION
A Program of Diet and Exercise
and a Design for Living
S. Boyd Eaton, Marjorie Shostak, and Melvin Konner
New York: Harper & Row, 1988
306 pp., $17.95
CHOLESTEROL & CHILDREN
A Parent's Guide to Giving
Children a Future Free of Heart Disease
Robert E. Kowalski
New York: Harper & Row, 1988
302 pp., $ 16.95
It is a remarkable fact that urbanized man, since the second industrial revolution (the first was the discovery of fire), namely the invention of agriculture and the domestication of plant and animal foods some eleven thousand years ago, has been doing everything in his power to kill himself. He eats the wrong foods, lives in the wrong kinds of dwellings--containing the temple in which he performs his ritual ablutions by washing away those healthy secretions from his magnificently endowed skin--and carries out in a most unphysiological manner those eliminations that he dares not name (he should be squatting instead of sitting on a horizontal toilet seat). He eats the wrong food in the wrong proportions and quantities, all too often prepared in a manner that reduces its value as food and contributes to his ill health in the form of diseases and disorder that were unknown to his prehistoric ancestors. His life is for the most part sedentary, and his exercise ludicrous when it is not damaging. And yet, in spite of this seeming perversity, and much else along similar lines, he manages to live, on average, appreciably longer than his ancestors. In fact, the average life expectancy of prehistoric man--indeed, of man up to about 1861, was 33 1/3 years. Today (in the United States) it is about seventy years for males and seventy-eight for females.
How has this remarkable increase in longevity come about? Medicine usually takes the credit for it, but would it were so! A number of recent independent reviews of the evidence (for the most recent see Leonard A. Sagan's admirable book The Health of Nations, New York, Basic Books, 1988) indicate that the medical care system did not materially contribute to the historical decline in death rates and even today may not be a significant factor in the explanation of modern life expectancy. Self care, improvements in the quality of life, sanitation, and other factors probably best account for the gradual increase in longevity since 1861.
In The Paleolithic Prescription, the authors S. Boyd Eaton, chief of the radiology department at West Paces Hospital and a member of the Health Policy Council for the State of Georgia, Marjorie Shostak, adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University, and Melvin Konner, professor of anthropology at Emory University, have set out to fill the gap in medical training, providing an understanding of the nature of a healthy diet and exercise, as well as a design for living. (That, indeed, is the subtitle of this fascinating book.) There is, however, much more in this book than is implied in the title and subtitle. It is also a manual to help beleaguered modern man revalue his values: to cease, for example, pursuing business as
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