IF the vegans are slowly killing themselves, I maintain that they have a right to do just that.

There are so many things that can shorten your life, skydiving, mountain climbing, excess alcohol consumption, hang gliding, smoking, cave diving, the list goes on and on.

As long as a person doesn't endanger my life, liberty, health, or my pursuit of happiness, he/she is not a problem to me.

I went out to an Italian restaurant with a bunch of colleagues recently and had a very nice, dainty serving of medium-rare tenderloin beef and asparagus, but what got me was the enormous size of the pasta dishes some of my tablemates got. Piled high on a big plate they were the volume of half a basketball. And mostly boring beige. Half a serving would fill an average stomach.

You'd think so... but I recall meals like that where my stomach might have felt like it was about to burst, but I was still hungry.

Between a hypoglycemic reaction to all that starch (which converts to glucose faster than table sugar), and the way all that starch robs your body of nutrients, I still felt like I was starving.

It's how I would eat a whole box of cereal, while my body was screaming for more milk, no doubt. My parents were poor but health conscious so we had non fat dry milk mixed with the whole, noodles with the hamburger, etc.

Now, I see food still differently. The whole aisles of bread, rice, alternate grains, noodles, pasta... it might as well be dirt. Nutritionally, it's wasted money, and actively harmful. At that price, they can't give it to me.

The Food Pyramid creates and sustains this crazy hunger the drug was developed to combat. Because the easiest and tastiest way to eat all those grains is make them into junk food. The faster/fluffier way to make bread creates even less nutrition than our ancestors got when they picked up their grain at the mill.

That's why each step backward from sitting around the fire has been bad for us, nutritionally speaking. That's the heart of how Paleo started, and the basic principles about "eat real food, not inventions" is still sound.