How do I drive my paleo coworker crazy?

Started a new job last week. Sharing a tiny office with a crazy paleo guy. He spent the day lecturing me about beans making ricin and leeching nutrients from my colon.

He is VERY preachy and I just don't need that. I am not a junk food person at all, I eat mainly just good home prepared food. I really don't believe the hype about eating such extreme diets where you cut out so many foods and eat so much bacon and steak. Not my thing.

I'd really like to have a bit of info to toss back at him when his mouth keeps flapping and all of this nonsense tumbles out. Any ideas?

he might like my blog:

http://cavepeopleandstuff.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/paleo-bread-recipe/

http://cavepeopleandstuff.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/the-lower-palaeolithic-diet/

http://cavepeopleandstuff.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/the-reality-of-palaeolithic-diets/ <-- tell him if he's not eating hippos he's doing it wrong....

btw I'm a palaeoanthropology nerd and studied a lot of this at university (albeit more than a decade ago and I'm still catching up on recent developments in palaeoanthropology)

I have nothing against the concept behind the palaeo diet, i.e. eating the diet we evolved to eat, however a) it's a bit extreme and not strictly necessary to cut out foods like dairy if you're not actually allergic or intolerant to them... humans are highly adaptable... and b) most of what gets put on the internet about the paleo diet is pseudoscience. Dairy is the only truly post-neolithic food (you can't milk wild animals), because neolithic man sure as anything didn't start cultivating foods no-one had ever eaten before...! They certainly didn't invent them, they just cultivated them. The main issue from a health standpoint is that the hunter-gatherer diet was wide and varied, while the neolithic diet relied very heavily on large quantities of a small number of plants, which led to nutritional deficiencies. There is an issue with cultivated varieties being more allergenic, and it's true that people from populations who have been hunter-gatherers until recent times have higher levels of lactose intolerance (which is evidence that people from populations with a long history of farming have adapted to be able to digest dairy!)... but there's no actual need to give up foods you're not allergic or intolerant to.

When I was at uni, one of the palaeoanthropology lecturers told us about the concept of palaeo dieting (this was in the late 90s) yet what he presented was totally different to what's on the internet now... the diet he talked about advised eating a very wide range of different plant foods rather than 2-3 staples, and also (where possible) to choose wild meat over farmed meat (domestic animals have undergone selective breeding just as domestic plants have!). Additionally, the main thing that stopped palaeolithic people from becoming obese is the amount of exercise they had to do to find food in the first place.

The upshot of it is if he's being self righteous, you can probably shut him up from some actual palaeoanthropology from actual peer reviewed journals. There's a phone app out there that you put a food in and it tells you if it's paleo or not........... Yet the journal of human evolution can't do that, so how is some food guru's phone app going to be able to tell me stuff about the diets of palaeolithic peoples that peer reviewed journals can't? "Caveman" (not the most accurate term really because most palaeolithic people didn't actually live in caves, just that caves preserve the remains of those that did a whole lot better than those who lived and died on the plains, in forests, etc) ate wild grains and legumes, and if you get into the whole wild v cultivated thing, you'll find it's practically impossible to get wild vareties of anything except meat and fish/seafood nowadays. Practically every plant in the supermarket will be a cultivated variety that's been subject to some degree of selective breeding. Look up how different wild bananas are to the cultivated varieties of banana and plantain you get in the supermarket.

Rum and coke?

Majority of nutrients are absorbed by the jejunum (middle part).

Duodenum absorbs iron, ileum absorbs most of the nutrients, the ileum and first part of large colon absorbs Vit K.



I've just cut and pasted this from an earlier post. If the "majority" of nutrients are absorbed by the jejunum, how can The ileum absorb "most " of the nutrients?

Sounds like a veggy in my place of work

i just ask does he eat haribo, and he seems to shut up (he eats beef flavour crisps which i find wierd!)

Nor am I the obese one.

You will always get preachers no matter what

im sick of hearing WW/SL say 'its free' and preaching about points in food too.

You said you wanted to let him know how annoying he is, so why not just tell him that in no uncertain terms?

If you get into these scientific or anthropological discussions with him, it's going to just keep going on and ON, which I'm guessing you don't want. He'll register those sorts of comments as you being interested and will take great joy in coming up with new pseudoscience talking points. Just leave it. Tell him directly that you have no interest in his paleo "research" or his dietary habits.

"I'm a vegan".

RICIN?? Aka one of the most toxic compounds known to man? I know someone who works with that in research and if they were to get a speck of it on their skin they'd be dead in a few days. How idiotic!

Excellent point!

Club him over the head, and drag him into a cave.

Talk like a caveman. "Me like food. Food good. Me lunch now." etc.