I still haven't listened to the interview, so I still don't know exactly what he has against paleo.

He doesn't actually condemn paleo - just seems to hate the term or that limiting yourself to the produce dept and the meat/fish dept of the grocery store is the same as hunter-gatherer foods and nothing else. If you go back to primitive versions of foods available in the wild, they would have been very different from what's in the grocery stores today that's considered appropriate for a paleo diet. There's nothing in the produce dept or the meat dept that's not the result of cross pollinating or breeding programs to produce a prettier/larger/better product. Even wild caught fish and seafood - they may be as close to paleo as we can get for those foods, but they've still been affected by the world we live in today. We also aren't going out in the wild and hunting it down with spear/trapping with snares or gathering it from the wild ourselves - which in and of itself was part of the whole eating experience for paleos.

I think he's also mocking that there's ONE TRUE WAY to eat for everyone on the planet, that it's a single diet called paleo, and that ideal diet is is the same for everyone, no matter what part of the world their genetic origins, and the small genetic adaptations or predispositions to the food in their environment which might have occurred along the way as populations spread out across the planet - some ending up in tropical environments where the plant and animal species were very different from the plant and animal species in Nordic countries, which were very different from plant and animal species in North America, and so on.

A paleo diet seems to be all over the place - and yet not. Not every part of the world where people spread out to had wild grapes growing, so going through the grocery store and saying "Grapes are paleo" doesn't necessarily apply to the last hundred generations of every individual's genetic make-up. I personally can't eat grapes (or anything made from grapes) without digestive distress. I apparently lack some digestive related gene that allowed almost everyone else in the family to use grape products with no problem.

Most of us have genes that adapted to do well on dairy, despite dairy not being considered paleo. Some of us would not do well at all if we had to completely eliminate all dairy from our diets in order to uphold some ideal of paleo eating.

But I think this is a big part of the point he's trying to get across:



He doesn't say this as such, but of course having all those babies and having them healthy enough to survive until their fertile years and reproduce their own healthy babies - that means the diet also needed to provide at least enough nutrients to each generation to result in healthy babies. Which means that what they were eating was working at a time when there were so many things that could snuff out a life in short order - not just attacks from wild animals, but also being so hungry that you ate some kind of plant or fruit that you didn't know was poisonous, or getting a scratch that became infected, turned septic and killed you.

I think the part about "we didn't evolve to be happy and healthy and nice" is part of what he's trying to get across - it was literally survival of the fittest and most aggressive, especially when it came to food. You had to get out there and hunt down/gather whatever food you could before someone else got it, because if you don't get it first, you'll do without, which will make you weak and less able to be the first to hunt down/gather food tomorrow. That aggressive nature still survives today - we have to be taught to tamp down our innate desire to think only of "my needs first" and be considerate of the needs of others.