 Thanks, Kamal. My purpose today is to talk about the future of paleo, and let me begin by saying that clearly the ancestral health movement has grown over the past few years. Here for example, we see searches for the term paleo diet, taking off between 2010 and 2013. We've also seen the publication of several New York Times best-selling books, including the Paleo Solution and Practical Paleo. And now there's even an idiot guide needing paleo and Living Paleo for Dummies, both published this year. We're also seeing some greater acceptance within the medical community, with the Paleo Physicians Network now listing hundreds of practitioners both around the United States and abroad. And paleo advocates are even appearing on mainstream media outlets. Here we see now Stevenson and Lauren Cordain appearing on the Dr. Oz Show earlier this year. All of this recent popularity is also backed up by some empirical data. Back in March, I ran an online survey of the ancestral health community and asked folks, how long have you been living a paleo lifestyle? And 85% said three years or less. In other words, 85% of respondents have joined this movement within the past three years. This is a remarkably high number. So clearly the paleo movement has been growing recently. But what about the future? Where are things headed? What will happen next? My main argument today is that the movement will continue to grow modestly, but it will not break through to the mainstream. In other words, it will remain a fringe movement with a small but highly dedicated group of followers. Now in order to build this argument, I'll proceed in three parts. First, I'll discuss the types of people who typically go paleo and why they do so. Second, I'll discuss the three main obstacles to go paleo going mainstream. And third, I'll present some common counter arguments to my position. And finally, I'll wrap things up in conclusions at the end. But before I proceed, let me first define by what I mean by paleo. For our purposes today, I'm going to find the term as the effort to optimize health by examining our evolutionary or ancestral past, which often includes such things as diet, exercise, sleep, time exposure, and social connections, among others. Okay, so on the part one, who goes paleo and why? Well, I believe there are two main reasons why people go paleo. First, there are those who are sick and for whom conventional medicine has failed. This is the most important reason, and I believe represents the majority of the folks in the paleo movement. And second, there are those people who are seeking performance, usually physical or mental performance. These people are optimizing. They're trying to find the best way to do things, the best way to eat, the best way to work out, the best way to optimize their health and their performance. And again, there's some empirical evidence to back this up. This is from the online survey that I ran earlier this year. And in our survey, the number one reason for going to paleo was weight loss at 31%. Now, I think we can understand this number in a couple of different ways. On the one hand, we can understand this desire to lose weight as a form of vanity, the desire to look good in a bathing suit. Or on the other hand, and I think more accurately, we can understand obesity and being overweight as a kind of disease, specifically a disease of civilization, which conventional medicine has been very hard time treating. In fact, we know that more than, that over 90% of folks who lose 20 pounds or more will eventually gain that weight back. So if we understand being overweight is a kind of illness, then the recovery from illness category more than doubles pushing over 50%. Also, when we look at the other category, we found that about 4% of respondents cited some specific disease, like IBS or arthritis, for the primary reason for going paleo. So we added those specific illnesses, then the grand total becomes 56%, making it by far the most important, motivating factor. Then we have the improvement of athletic and mental performance that is total of 11%. And we also see the response live more naturally at 17%, which I think is pretty darn interesting, but I don't have time to fully talk about here today. So returning to our two main groups. For me, the key point here is that these groups share commonalities. And that commonality is a high level of motivation. I would say this is often intrinsic motivation. In other words, both of these groups are highly self motivated. These people are highly motivated to get healthy, or improve the performance, or some combination of the two. And in fact, I would argue it takes a special kind of person to switch to an ancestral health lifestyle. Think about the kind of people you meet here at the conference, or the kind of people you know in your life, who have adopted a paleo lifestyle. What are they like? What do they do? In my experience, these people are often personal trainers, coaches, small business owners, professionals, consultants, entrepreneurs, they're often type A personalities. And what are they having common? Again, they're highly motivated, self directed, often willing to challenge authority, and usually have access to education and resources. And again, there's some empirical evidence to back this up. So in terms of education, we see that 74% of respondents hold a bachelor's degree or higher, which is two and a half times the national average at 30%. And we see 5% of respondents holding PhDs, while the national average is less than 1%. That's five times the national average. The story is similar when it comes to income. 41% of respondents have a household income of $100,000 or more, which is two and a half times the national average. So we see paleo folks being relatively well educated, and affluent compared to the population as a whole. In fact, at paleo ethics this year, someone said to me that paleo is a lifestyle of the 1%. While this is a bit of an exaggeration, it does capture certain aspects of the movement I said. Speaking of income and education, we also know that socioeconomic socioeconomic status is tied to race. And we found that 92% of respondents in our survey were white. The national average is only 72% and shrinking. So at the moment of growing racial diversity in this country, the ancestral health movement is overwhelming white. That by itself does not bode well for the future of paleo. Now since I'm talking about demographics, let me give you a bit more information about the typical respondents to our survey. Hopefully this will help round out the picture of who goes paleo and why. First, a clear majority were women, 56 to 44%. Next, the mean age was 38 years old with the standard deviation of 11. So many of these folks to be classified as middle age. And finally, we found that the majority was married or with a life partner. In fact, 68% of respondents report being in a committed relationship. Now, as an aside, let me say that one of the things I find most interesting about the survey results is how much they differ from the common media stereotypes. More often than not, the typical paleo and parents is portrayed as a vain, single, white, young man who eats lots of red meat. In other words, they are portrayed as modern cavemen. But as I had just discussed, most of these stereotypes just don't hold up. There seems to be then a real disconnect between who actually goes paleo and the common representation in the media. Okay, so let me try to wrap up and summarize part one. First, who goes paleo? Again, majority are women and it appears from the data that more women are now joining the movement than men. Also, we see the majority of folks fallen between 27 to 49 years old. They are white, highly educated, relatively affluent, married or in committed relationships. And we also saw a very high avoidance of brains and legumes, but not of dairy and alcohol. And why did these folks go paleo? Again, there are two main reasons. Those people who are sick and for whom conventional medicine failed, and those people who are seeking performance. And I think this all adds up to a special kind of person, or just this person who is self directed, willing to challenge authority, has access to education resources, and is highly motivated. Now, let me turn to part two of my talk. The three main obstacles to paleo going mainstream, which I'm going to label as cultural, physiological, and social. Okay, so obstacle number one, my main argument here is that neolithic foods are tightly woven into the fabric of our culture. They're so tightly woven, in fact, that that's no exaggeration to say that human civilization was literally built on neolithic food. And this is no accident. This is no coincidence. It grains legumes and dairy that allowed early population to expand, and it sustained us for thousands of years. So it's neolithic foods that really allowed for the development of civilization, including things like the division of labor, the accumulation of wealth, greater social hierarchy, and new forms of technology, among others. In other words, human civilization was literally founded on and continues to be based on neolithic food. So without this early agriculture, you wouldn't have that downtown Atlanta. That's my point here that's going to be really hard to remove grains, legumes, and dairy from our daily lives, much harder than many people realize. And let's talk about a few examples. First, how about the import? How about the importance of bread within Christianity? The Lord's Prayer says, give us give us this day our daily bread. And of course, bread is absolutely central in the Christian sacrament of communion. That's when the priest takes bread and wine and turns it into the body and blood of Christ. In this context, how does giving a bread or grain sound to a devout Christian? Next, we could talk about the importance of master and the Jewish holiday of Passover. And let's think about the centrality of rights in many Asian cultures. Or how about the importance of tortillas in Latin America? Well, let's bring it a bit closer to home. Can you imagine a wedding without a wedding dinner? Or a ball game about the hot dog? And how to relive without mom's apple pie? And then there's this and then there's this problem. Wouldn't it be totally unpatriotic to get rid of American cheese, this process food? Now, I know there are many paleo substitutes for these things. But my point here is to highlight the huge cultural significance of these foods. And again, my main argument in this section is that neolithic foods are tightly woven into the fabric of our culture. And that's going to be really hard to remove them from our daily lives. Okay, I'd like to move on to the second main obstacle. And my main argument here is that neolithic food and simple carbohydrates in particular appear to be addictive. So giving up grains, legumes, and dairy represents a real physical or physiological challenge. And why are they addictive? Well, they first they taste good. Who can resist this? Or this? This is a whole food cookie bar. I took it at the paleo effects in Austin. So whether you like it or not, we taste good. And we often crave that. And these cravings lead us to eat for reasons other than hunger, which can lead to all kinds of problems. And these problems even made the cover of National Geographic magazine this month. And these sweet foods are really hard to compete with. Here is a Google trend line for paleo diet that I showed you earlier. And here's that same trend line plot against the term cupcakes. Paleo diets in blue and cupcakes in red. Clearly, clearly, paleo can't compete with cupcakes. And we also can become addicted to neolithic foods because they tap into a real evolutionary need. Specifically in a scarce environment, having a preference for highly sweet and fatty food has survival and reproductive advantages. But unfortunately, those same preferences often lead to problems in our current food environment of over and abundant. Also, unfortunately, for us, food manufacturers today know all about the free program preferences and do everything they tend to exploit that. So in other words, the food game, it's fixed. Multinational corporations spend literally billions of dollars to make foods hyper palatable and they keep us coming back for more. If you haven't seen it, I encourage you to check out Michael Moss's new book, Salt Sugar Fast. He shows how corporations such as Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills have used the latest technology to calculate the bliss point of sugary beverages and to enhance the mouthfeel of fat by manipulating chemical structure. It's one of the most revealing and damning books of the food industry that I've read. And this next point I think is really important. All of this is more problematic because the typical American diet consists of 70%, 70% Neolithic or industrial food, which includes cereal, dairy products, refined sugar, refined vegetable oils, and alcohol. In other words, when we ask someone to go paleo, we're asking them to change or give up almost three quarters of their diet, and the very three quarters that's the most addictive. And finally, there's some evidence to suggest that these there's some research evidence to suggest just how addicted these foods can be. And I briefly like to mention five studies that illustrate this point. First, this study from 2006 shows how the main reward and pleasure centers of the brain light up more intensely for foods like chocolate cake and pizza and for blender foods like vegetables. This next study shows how rodents become quickly addicted to sugar, often choosing it over cocaine. And there's also the suggestion that a similar thing happens to humans. This new study from 2013 shows how high glycemic foods cause subjects to report more hunger and to consume more food in the post perennial period. In other words, eating high glycemic food makes you want even more food later on. This study also showed that high glycemic foods produce greater activation in parts of the brain that regulate cravings, reward, and addictive behaviors. And I have two studies showing that wheat and dairy can activate opioid, opioid receptors in our body and thus possibly cause food addiction. This first one's about dairy from 2003. And the second is an older study about wheat from 1990, 1979. So again, my main argument in this section is that many nihilistic foods appear to be addictive. Some have even been engineered to be hyper palatable. So it's going to take a great deal of effort to remove them from our daily diet. This brings me to my third point, which I would call social or values obstacles. Specifically, today we see a sense of entitlement, which privileges transitory fun over true mental and physical flourishing for what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. And this desire to just have fun manifests itself in different ways. First, there's the I deserve it syndrome. We've all heard of friends or a coworker or a family member or perhaps even ourselves say, I deserve that cookie. I deserve that new car, even though I can't afford it. We simply don't like being told it can't eat certain foods. And certain foods, as I just discussed, have high emotional or cultural significance. We've also been told again and again everything in moderation. This approach just doesn't line up the teleo model. And instant gratification is another aspect of this as well. We want things. We want them now. We want the results now. We don't want to wait. And most of us don't want to struggle to give what we really want or to really change ourselves. I ask my students all the time, what's most important to you? Or what's your goal when you get out of college? And more often than not, the answer is the same. I want to be happy. And I don't mean to just stick on my students here. I think most people feel this way. And I wouldn't say that this is necessarily their fault. It's necessarily a bad thing. Society tells us all the time to just be happy. In fact, there's a whole subfield within psychology that studies how to be happier, which is called, of course, positive psychology. And this obsession with being happy even made the cover of Time Magazine last month. And heck, it's even woven into our American creed. As Americans were told from birth to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. The result is a kind of cult of personal happiness, which shapes all aspects of our daily lives, from morality and personal relationships, to the daily equations that we make. In fact, a recent New York Times article entitled The Gospel According to Me makes exactly this point. The two authors conclude that personal happiness starts personal well-being and happiness have become the primary goals of doing life. But I'd like to remind you all that being happy is not the only possible life goal. Instead, we as individuals or we as a society as a whole could value most other things. Social justice, artistic creation, the reduction of suffering, sexual ecstasy, or what the Greeks, the production of knowledge, or what the Greeks called eudaimonia, which as I mentioned a moment ago, is best translated as a kind of mental, holistic mental and physical flourishing. And in many ways I think that's what the ancestral health movement is really all about. But as I just said, I think most people today are more interested in just having fun and frankly in escapism. And as a result, they are not willing or motivated enough in this case to invest the time, energy, and resources into living a paleo-life style. And let's be honest, it does take some effort. I also believe this is a cross-generational issue, so I'm going to be an equal opportunity offender here. I think this feeling of entitlement and desire to just have fun is found in millennials, gen-exers, and babes. Now of course the forms of fun and escapism vary from time to time and from generation to generation, but we are familiar with what these look like. Movies, television, video games, and the web, called fiction, professional sports, and various forms of self-medication. I would argue that all of these activities fail to promote true physical and mental flourishing. And they've also led to what the cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn has called the reality problem. In his new book, Waiting for the Barbarians, Mendelsohn argues that new technologies and media allow us to be private in public and have caused a profound alteration in our sense of what is true and what is fiction. In other words, we live in an error in what is possible to permanently escape into a kind of personal reality, separate from any kind of common reality, or separate from any kind of truth. He calls this the preeminent cultural event of our day. And I think this is a real obstacle for the ancestral health movement going forward. Now while we're on this subject, I'd like to talk about another kind of reality problem. So far in this section of my presentation, I've been discussing societal values. And another place where paleo is out of depth with the mainstream is its emphasis on scientific reasons. Simply put, there is a strong current of anti-intellectualism and pseudo-skepticism in our society today. We see this when it comes to the issue of climate change and also when it comes to this theory of evolution. So here are the survey results from the ancestral health community. 65% of respondents believe in evolution by natural selection without any influence from God. That's a pretty high number. And it dwarfs the national average. In the most recent national poll, only 14%, that's right, 14% of Americans believe in straight evolution by natural selection, which leads me to an obvious question. How is the ancestral health movement ever going to convert majority of the population when most Americans don't even believe in the fundamental premise upon which the movement is based? I don't have a good answer for you. I also think that most people within the paleo movement fail to appreciate how revolutionary all this is. Stop and think about it for a moment. Removing neolithic food and walking everywhere and turning off your computer and going to bed when it gets dark out, all of these things radically change rather than alter the way we live, eat, work, and socialize. And if society as a whole adopted these practices, it would have profound political and economic vocation. And I'm not the first person to recognize this. I'd like to offer you two quotes. The first is from Andrew Badenot, and I think this quote is really important, so I'd like to read it. Agriculture and particularly grains and the state, I'm going to start over. Agriculture, particularly grains in the state, have always been mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing. Disengaging from the system and industrial agriculture and branded or otherwise value-added food products is a fundamentally a revolutionary act that erodes GDP and attacks based in terms. In other words, dismantling industrial grain-based agriculture means nothing less than dismantling the modern state. The second quote is from Mark Sisson. If we would imagine if we convert the entire world to failure that would tank the economy, and it would tank the economy because, according to Sisson, 30% less food would be needed to feed everyone and health care costs would dramatically drop, beating a huge gap in GDP. Now there's much more I could say about how revolutionary paleo-taleo is, but I'm going to leave it here for now because I need to wrap up this section of my talk. So to pull together part two, I've highlighted three main obstacles facing the ancestral health movement. Those obstacles again are cultural, physiological, and social. But notice what I've left out. Large vested interests in trench professional organizations and the relatively high costs and inconvenience of going paleo at this time. Now these three other things are important and significant and are often mentioned in the paleo blogosphere, but I would argue they're not nearly as important and as significant as the broader cultural, physiological, and social obstacles that I outlined above. In other words, these things have to be overcome as well, which brings me to part three of my talk. So far I've talked about who goes paleo is why and the main obstacles to paleo going mainstream. Now I'd like to turn to some of the common counter-arguments to my position. I'd like to talk about two specific examples. So counter-argument number one. We all know that health movements come and go. In fact, about a hundred years ago we saw the development of something very similar to paleo called the physical cultural movement, which of course faded away, but I often hear this time is different and the argument specific goes something like this. This time is really different. Today we have the internet and social media and Tumblr and Twitter and everything else. This time we are going to change the world. But here's my response. The internet is only a tool. A powerful tool for education but only a tool nevertheless. Education simply is not enough. Spreading the word through social media and the internet are not enough. Education is not the same thing as motivation. And education does not automatically lead to behavior change. And let me give you an example to make my point. For decades, cigarettes have carried warning labels and there's been a massive public and there've been massive public health campaigns to inform the public about the dangers of smoking. And around the world some of these warnings have been quite graphic. Here we see examples from Australia, Canada, Canada, and Uruguay. I like the one on the right in Uruguay. It says, if you smoke, you won't get it out. Yet many, many people continue to smoke. My point here is that despite having education, despite knowing that it's bad, people continue to do it. But motivation is necessary as well. In fact, I would argue that motivation is one of the key parts of a much more complicated equation. So education plus motivation and ability and the proper triggers lead to behavior change. Which recalls the first part of my talk about the importance of a high level of motivation in folks who go and stay paleo. So on to the second counter argument. You might say okay, so it might take more than the internet. But surely we're close to a tipping point. A tipping point where paleo will go mainstream. And you might add just look at all the rapid growth you discussed in the beginning of your talk today. Clearly paleo is growing and it's the best approach to health and the best information always rises to the top. And here's my response. We are nowhere close to a tipping point. But to fully understand this we need to look at the law of the law of diffusion of innovation. So what is the law of diffusion of innovation? It explains how successful ideas spread. But rather than describe it myself, I'm going to let Simon Sinek do it formally. Back in 2011 he gave one of the most popular TED talks of all time. It's received more than 11 million total views. And I'd like to show a two-minute clip of his talk. It's a great video. You should just check it out online. You want to go to minute 11 in five seconds. It's a two-minute long clip. Explains what we're talking about here. In any case, Simon Sinek here talks about the law of diffusion of innovation. And basically for an idea for something to take off, it has to reach a certain critical tipping point. And this tipping point is about somewhere between 14 and 18 percent of the of the of the population. So it has to hit between 14 and 18 percent for what become mainstream for the majority of the the clue into it. So this is a graph of that law of diffusion of innovation. So the question is where exactly is the ancestral health movement on this graph? And in order to answer this question that we need to know the current size of the movement. Which is actually quite a difficult question to answer for a couple of reasons. First, people define paleo differently. And second, being paleo can be quite fluid. Some people come and go and some people adopt certain lifestyle changes but not others. Now in order to accurately determine the size of the movement you would need a large national telephone survey which is rather costly and hasn't been done yet. In the absence of such a survey I tried to estimate the current size of the movement. So over the past two over the past year I've collected empirical data things like book sales, web page views, and podcast downloads. I've also asked the number of paleo experts and here's the number I've come up with. Somewhere between one and three million people in the United States. Now that's a pretty big number but let's compare it to the national population which is 310 million. It can take the high end of the estimate and assume that three million people are paleo that only gives us one percent of the population. One percent of the population. So returning to a graph that pushes here at the very bottom of the curve which is nowhere near the tipping point of 14 to 18 percent. And by the way I would describe being mainstream. What do I mean by mainstream? Is the movement being above 18 percent of the population into that early majority phase? You would need something like 46 million people to be paleo to be close to that tipping point. Heck at one percent we probably aren't even in the earlier doctor phase yet. And remember only 14 percent of Americans actually believe in evolution by natural selection. Once again this seems like a real problem for the future of paleo. In any case maybe you think my estimate's low but even if you were to double my estimate to 6 million or 2 percent of the population that would still put us in a category of innovators. And by the way I think these innovators are exactly the kind of special person that I was talking about earlier in part one of my talk. My main point here is that we are a long way from a tipping point. Thus a long way from paleo going mainstream. Now while I'm on the topic of paleo going mainstream I want to say a final word about the online service. My basic argument today is that the ancestral health movement will grow modestly but will never break through to the mainstream. And somewhat to my surprise many of the respondents to our survey felt the same way. In fact two thirds said that the majority of their country's population will never live a paleo lifestyle. So it appears as though many within the movement are not terribly optimistic about either. Finally to the conclusion my purpose today was not to pass final judgment on a paleo movement. Instead my real purpose today was to start a conversation about the future. And in many ways the origins of this conversation go back to AHS 12 and Boston a year ago. At the end of my talk about the similarities between the physical culture movement and the paleo movement of today there was time for one question. And Seth Roberts asked the perfect question. He asked me will the paleo movement go mainstream? Well will it fade away like the physical culture movement of a hundred years ago? And my answer was that the paleo movement would not go mainstream. So my talk here today really represents the complete answer to Seth's important question. It also represents the third and final part of the trilogy for me. First in Boston last year I spoke about the historical origins of the ancestral health movement. Then at Paleo FX I gave a talk on the current state of the movement. And finally today I talked at length about the future of the ancestral health movement. In the end the overall goal of the trilogy was simple. I wanted to encourage a broader conversation about where we are and where we're heading. Right now far too many people within the movement simply assume that paleo will continue to grow and expand but we cannot take that growth for granted. Nothing is destined to occur, occur no matter how right you think you are. Instead we together as a group need to identify the most significant challenges ahead and then develop effective strategies to overcome that. I tried to start that process today and I look forward to continuing this conversation with all of you in the future. That concludes my presentation. Thank you very much for your attention. Unfortunately we could take a very quick question. It seems like two of the cultural obstacles anti-evolutionary beliefs and hedonic individualism might exist in a two lesser degree in Europe and East Asia. Are you more optimistic about Paleo taking off there? I haven't thought about East Asia. I haven't thought about East Asia. I'm a European historian. I think a lot more about Europe. I don't think there is a better chance in Europe because in some ways I clearly see your point and I agree with it but in some ways I think these neolithic foods are more deeply woven into many European societies. I think about bread in Spain or bread in France for example. There was an article in New York Times you probably saw it about the decline of bread consumption and how the French government, the French people want to want to bring that back up and the public health campaign to increase bread consumption. So I'm not sure I'd be much more optimistic but I agree with your assessment. The last talk in this room will start in about five to ten minutes. We will also be having a movement session in between with Esther Gokle who will be running up here and leading the the next five or ten minutes if you want to stick around this room.