 I'm a historian, so I'm interested in the whole paleo thing as a social movement. So where did it come from? Where we are today and where it might be going in the future. And today I want to talk specifically about what has happened over the past five years. To proceed, I actually want to go back, I want to go back in time about five or six years ago to 2013. And I want to talk about the media stereotypes and the reality back then. And then I want to compare that data from 2013 to a new online survey we ran in 2018 last fall. And then I want to talk about what changed and then what stayed the same over that five year period. And then in part three, I'm going to wrap things up in a short conclusion. Okay, so I want to apologize right up front. I'm going to show you a lot of data and a lot of graphs. So to simplify things, I've decided to highlight seven takeaway points. I think these seven takeaway points represent some of the most interesting and important findings from our study. Okay, so part one, let's go back five or six years and talk first about media stereotypes. All right, so quickly certain stereotypes begin to emerge. So we see the individual is male, he's white, and perhaps a bit underdressed for the occasion. This next one is an idealized image here. And we see, again, a white male relatively young who is eating meat. Speaking of meat, again, we see relatively young white male this time eating raw meat. And then this might be my favorite, the dude who was allergic to shirts. This is from the GQ online dating guide. I think the impression we're supposed to get at this young man is rather vain. So if we put this all together, I would summarize what we were seeing about five years ago for trading the media as, you know, people who are vain, single, young white men who eat meat. And I was like, is that true? Is that representative of the ancestral health community? So back in 2013 with some co-authors, I ran the first academic survey of the paleo community. Here are the details. It was an anonymous online self-selected survey. We had about 4,000 people participate. Pretty good number for an online survey. And here were some of the major results. So this is the reality part. Majority were women. They were middle-aged. They were white, 92 percent white, highly educated, relatively affluent, rather being single, two-thirds are in a committed relationship. They earned quite a bit of money. And we saw high avoidance of legumes and grains, but not of dairy and alcohol. And then finally in terms of motivation, people said their primary motivation for going paleo was either to lose weight or to resolve health problems or concerns. If you want to read more about this, we published our findings in the Journal of Evolution and Health back in 2013, and you can easily find that online. All right. So I knew back then that I wanted to run a follow-up survey five years later. So 2018 rolled around. I contacted my co-authors. I said, hey, you all want to do this again? They said, great. So last fall, we ran a follow-up survey. We distributed it and marketed it in the same way. But interestingly, we only had 1,500 respondents this time. So we can talk more about that at the end. So far fewer number of people completed the survey, even though we tried to distribute it in exactly the same way. Can't really say why the change. OK. So now I want to go into what stayed the same over the five-year period, statistically the same, and what changed. So I'm going to spend much shorter time on what stayed the same, because I think what's changed is really interesting. All right. So things that are the same, again, majority female, vast majority white. These are people who respond to the survey. We saw the same amount of strictness per week. People reported eating paleo 87% per week. Same. About 60% of people said they consumed safe starches, which we defined as sweet potatoes, white rice, stuff like that. The belief in evolution was the same, which was a little surprising to me. 66% of respondents said they believed in straight evolution with no influence from God. By the way, that's way, way higher than the US national average, like three times higher. Sleep was the same, which was a little surprising, right? It seems like there are more demands on our time, social media, et cetera. So people were sleeping the same. And then in terms of where respondents were from, the same top countries and states showed up. You can see that at the bottom of the slide. Okay, I want to shift gears and talk about things that were statistically different in 2018. All right. First, age. So the average or mean age went up by five years. So as a whole, the paleo movement now, or the people who respond to our survey more specifically, are now on average five years older. So these are Gen Xers, born between 1966 and 1980. These are middle-aged people. If we graph that, chart that, it looks something like this. So we can see the whole movement has shifted older over this five-year period. And this leads me to take home point number one, right? Paleo people who respond to our survey on average are older. Now there could be a couple explanations for that. I'm going to return to this point at the end. But it appears as though fewer young people are joining the movement, or fewer young people have joined the movement recently. All right. So now I want to go into a bunch of other demographic information. And this is where we get into lots of graphs. So we asked about education. I'll give you a second to digest this slide. The orange bars are always 2013. And the blue bars are always 2018. And the orange bars tend to be on top. And obviously the blue bars are underneath in each category. So what stands out here is how people have become even more highly educated. So we see 77% of individuals hold a four-year degree or higher. 6% have PhDs. The US averages under 1%. And as a whole, with a broader context, only 3% of Americans hold a bachelor's degree. Only 33% of Americans hold a bachelor's degree. So 33% of Americans hold a bachelor's degree as a whole. Yet 77% here have a four-year degree or higher. So this is a pretty remarkable number. And this is take-home point number two. So the very, very high level of education. Income. We see a similar kind of thing. So what stands out here to me is the very large number of people who earn, or who have household income, above $100,000 a year. 50%. And at the same time, the national average is only around 30%. So there's what we've seen is, and over the five-year period, we see more people making more money. Look at that above $250,000 row. So I think the take-home point here is that respondents to our survey were quite affluent, especially if we take into consideration that the median national household income in the United States is approximately $60,000 a year. All right, family structure. Again, we didn't see a whole lot of single people. And in fact, we see more people in a committed relationship and more people with children. So 74%, almost three-quarters of respondents, are married or in a committed relationship now in 2018. So take-home point number four. Paleo peeps are committed, right? The national average is somewhere around 56%. Well, that number's a little old. All right, food avoidance. So what are people eating? What stands out here to me is that fewer people are avoiding legumes, right, more people are eating legumes, and more people are avoiding dairy and alcohol. Why is that? We were unable to determine that from our survey, but I think those results are pretty interesting. Supplements. Again, we see a range of different supplements here. The two biggest differences have to do with fish oil, fewer people taking fish oil now, and more people taking magnesium compared to five years ago. Motivation. So what are people's? We ask people to identify their primary reason for going paleo. And this is what we see. Again, the top two responses from 2013 dominated, and those were weight loss, although slightly, but significantly fewer people are doing it for weight loss, and more people on the top are doing it to recover from illness, yet those are the two biggest ones. Overall, 53% go paleo to lose weight or recover from illness. Why the change in that direction? I'm not sure in terms of weight loss. It might be because of the popularity of low carbohydrate diets, in particular keto, and the carnivore diet. So maybe people who are interested in alternative diet paradigms are shifting to other things to lose weight. All right, this was interesting in this time of talking about climate change. Not a single person in either survey selected environmental sustainability as the number one reason for going paleo. So I know people care about this issue here. I know it's an important topic. I've heard people talk about it here, but it's not showing up as the primary motivator. All right, take home point number five. Majority of people are going paleo to resolve health issues or to lose weight, not because of environmental concerns. Then we asked about difficulty. How hard is it to live a paleo lifestyle? And what we see here is that in general, people reported that it was pretty darn easy to maintain a paleo lifestyle. 70% said it was very easy or somewhat easy. So it was a little surprising to me. In terms of the change, we see that top row, a significant number of people said it's very easy now. After five years, to maintain this paleo diet, there could be a whole number of reasons for that, which I don't have time to go into right now. Obstacles. So what makes it difficult to live a paleo lifestyle? The biggest decrease we saw over the five years was too expensive. So fewer people think it's too expensive. That might be because of lower cost paleo foods or it might be because people now are earning more money, as we saw in a previous slide. And more people said, man, it's a bummer to give up our favorite non-paleo foods. CrossFit. We asked about CrossFit in both surveys. There are 5% fewer people doing CrossFit, maybe older people are not as into CrossFit. So we saw a drop from 16% to 11%. All right, health outcomes. So we asked a bunch of questions about how has the paleo diet changed your health? This is going to be a scary graph. Here we go. Can't talk about all of it now. But overall, we see people reporting improvement in really all of the categories. Overall health, mental performance, athletic performance, need for medication, et cetera, body composition. But the biggest change we saw had to do with blood chemistry. So the question of blood chemistry, what stands out is that far before fewer people knew were unsure about their blood chemistry, but now five years later, a lot more people know about their blood chemistry and they say it has improved. Again, why is that? It's hard to say. Maybe there's greater access to health care. Maybe there's better recognition of the importance of doing routine blood work. Maybe changes with the Affordable Care Act has made it more accessible for some people. Again, we can't tell exactly from our survey. All right. So we also asked some new questions on this survey. All the information I've presented up until now, they were the exact same questions on both surveys. Same wording, same choices, we kept it the same. But we asked a few new questions that we either didn't ask last time or we were trying to get at what might be happening now or in the future. So one of the questions we asked was about political party affiliation, particularly in the United States. And there seemed to be kind of like a myth or an urban rumor that people who impale you were primarily live and let live libertarians. So what we see though is that there's really a pretty diverse spectrum of political beliefs here. Democrat, independent, libertarian, Republican. So you see a pretty good amount of political diversity in the responses to this question. Just to give you some reference points, the national averages in 2018, national averages in the US, 30% Democrat. So it's very close to the national average for Democrats. And the national average for Republicans in 2018 was 26%. So there are significantly fewer Republicans who responded to our survey. So take home point number six, people who completed our survey are pretty politically diverse, which was a bit of a surprise for me personally. All right, so then we also surveyed people who were paleo but are no longer. So we wanted to find out if they're not paleo anymore, then what happened? Why did they leave? What are they doing? So we asked them for the primary reason for stopping paleo. And give you a second to digest this. And for me, the top four reasons are interesting. So 38%, they said they changed to a new specific diet, which I'm going to talk about those diets in a minute. 11% said limited food choices. 9% said lack of motivation. And then 8% said no specific reason. So turning to new specific diet, so we asked if you are not following a paleo diet, are you following some specific diet? And what we see here is that 40% reported no particular diet. So did these people go back to eating Twinkies for breakfast? I have no idea, but this was super surprising. 40% say, hey, I'm not following any specific diet right now after being paleo. 13% said low carb, 10% said keto, and then Mediterranean vegan, vegetarian are way further down the list. So this was really surprising to me, really remarkable. All right, so I think this is another really important point. We asked folks, how long have you been living a paleo diet in terms of years? 1, 2, 3, 10? And what we see here is a pretty remarkably equal distribution in terms of the number of years people have been following a paleo diet. So it ranges somewhere between 9% and say 10% or 11%. And again, the distribution here is pretty interesting. So some people have been doing it a long time. Some people have been doing it a medium amount of time. And some people have been doing it a really long time, short time. But what stands out here in particular is that 33% of respondents joined within the last three years. OK, so within the last three years, 33% of the people who responded to the survey said, this is when we joined. This is when we started. Now, I want to compare this to five years ago. And five years ago, 85% of respondents had joined within the past five years. That's a huge difference. And when we re-ran this survey, I was really curious what we were going to see here. Because back in 2013, what's really interesting about this, this 85% number, was that there were a lot of people joining. Like, wow, the growth was amazing. But it was also very new, right? So growth, yet novelty, a lot of new people doing it. So the question that was in my mind for the past five years was, are people still doing it? Did they stick with it? Right? So I want to come back to that thought here at the end. But what we do see here is that there have been far fewer people joining recently. All right, take-home point number seven is that people are going paleo at a much slower rate compared to 2013. Again, 33% compared to 85%. Bonus take-home point. So we looked at the age of the people who joined within the past three years in 2018, right? And actually in both years. And we see that on average, they're about three years older. So the people who have joined recently are on average older. And I think that is significant as well. All right, I'm getting to my conclusions here, wrapping things up. I want to summarize the findings here in two or three slides. And I want to start with what has stayed the same to emphasize this. So again, contrary to the media stereotypes of before, and I would argue this media stereotypes have continued over the past five years. We see that a majority of respondents are women, overwhelmingly white. They're pretty strict. A bunch of them meet some safe starches, high belief in evolution, a fair amount of sleep. Actually, that's about an hour more on average than Americans get per night. So paleo people are sleeping more. And the same countries show up and the same states show up as being the primary location of people who respond to our survey. All right, and here's the difference. The difference is summarized. As I mentioned, I've mentioned all this before, but to reiterate, to summarize, folks are older. They're super well educated compared to the national average. They are much more affluent. They're in committed relationship. They're eating some less dairy and alcohol, but more legumes. They're consuming less fish oil, but more magnesium. There's less crossfit. We see a pretty high level of political diversity. And we see what I think we can interpret as fewer and older people joining the movement, or at least those who responded to our survey. And this leads me to the final point, is perhaps things are not the paleo movement or the ancestral movement as a whole is not as big right now and is not growing as fast, which leads me to my final slide. Has there been a paleo decline? And if so, what has been the cause of that decline? Those are difficult questions to answer. The way our survey was designed, I cannot say the paleo movement is smaller, because it was a self-selected anonymous study. So it can't make a claim based on our survey data that it's smaller, but based on other things that I've looked at from new books and book sales and web traffic and a whole bunch of things, it seems like perhaps the movement's more mature, but not as big and not growing as fast. And a future avenue of my research is to think about and write about, has there been a decline? And if so, why? And I'd also love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think there has been a decline? And if so, why? So with that, I will thank you for your attention and thank you to the people who helped with the project. So thanks for that, Hamilton. So I'm open to the idea that it's declined just because there's always excitement at the beginning and things eventually decline. However, this is paleo distinct from keto and carnivore because there's so much excitement, especially with the keto and smaller degree to the carnivore, that it's hard for me to believe that ancestral thinking is shrinking. Yeah. Thank you very much for that question. And I think it's a very good one. And I think perhaps there's two ways of thinking about it. Perhaps one way is to think about that there was this popular movement. Maybe you could use the word fad, right? There was a certain fad aspect to the movement where there were some early adopters and some popularizers, and it took off, and then it peaked, and now it's sort of slowed down or stabilized. So I agree with you there that I think maybe there's this fad component, but, but, but I think the underlying evolutionary principles to health, nutrition, disease, they are not going anywhere. They are here for the long term. And we've seen over time conventional medicine pick up these ideas, get on board late. Circadian rhythms, the saturated fad may not be so bad for you, the importance of the microbiome. So all these things that the paleo community has been talking about for years, seven, eight years, right? We increasingly see now incorporated into the mainstream. So I totally agree that the underlying principles are here to stay, but whatever this social movement was with the people who were popular and wrote the books and had the websites and identifying as paleo seems to have changed. Like, paleo just doesn't seem as cool to me right now. Keto's cool, carnivore's cool, right? But for whatever reason, this brand Keto, like, is not as cool. Thanks Hamilton, that was great. And yeah, I had a similar set of thoughts, too, I guess, about whether paleo, if it is losing some of its powers and identities, nonetheless diffusing, it's infecting wider society more, in which case I'd be very happy with that outcome, right? But I also have a thought about identity, because when somebody makes a dietary transition, it seems like the identity is very important. They happen to exercise abstentions, withhold certain foods, learn new skills. And so that sense of, OK, I'm doing this and this is who I am now is much more of a support base. And then as it becomes habitual, maybe you don't kind of feel the need anymore to call yourself anything in particular. It's just the way you eat. So I mean, I wonder about whether some of the people who said that they're no longer paleo because they're not doing anything in particular might nonetheless also be still eating pretty well as a result of having gone through that experience. Yeah, I totally agree with you, right? So as you just said, if it becomes normalized for you, you no longer see it as this special unique thing in your life. So I think we have seen that normalization and maybe that helps explain the more equal distribution and how long people have been doing it. Again, I think there's a kind of lack of a better word, maturity in the movement, your stability in the movement. What will happen going forward? I'm not so sure. But thank you for your comment and question. I think it's obvious from your survey that paleo is the path to being smarter and going more money. Making more money. But my other comment is, is that even though we live in a small town, the local grocery store, we can get in everything we need to have a paleo lifestyle. And so I agree with your thing. It's kind of become mainstream. So consequently, it's not so noticeable as it was when all that stuff was hard to get. Yes, yes. And I think I totally agree with you. And I think this is represented in the survey responses of how easy it is to be paleo. So bunches of people who respond to the survey are saying, it's pretty darn easy to do this today. So I do agree with you. I live in a small town. I can eat paleo. But I will say this. Just recently, I live in a small town in upstate New York, kind of in the middle of nowhere, really mediocre grocery store. But it has a little magazine like Isle. And just recently, guess what magazine showed up in there? Keto Magazine. Big glossy Keto Magazine. There's no paleo magazine. Never been a paleo magazine there. Lived there for 10 years in this area. But now there's a Keto Magazine. I was like, whoa. I loved your presentation, anecdotally. The fish oil and magnesium thing, I think, is probably the education of the community by people like Cressor and Master John. But the numbers didn't quite jive with my anecdotal experience at Paleo FX, particularly the age and the numbers. So I quickly reached out to Keith and Michelle Norris, owners of Paleo FX. Yeah, sure. They're over at Mindshare right now. So what I got back from them is the numbers in 2015 were around 3,000 attendees. By 2017, that had jumped up to 6,800. 2018, 7,500. And last year, or this year, they were 8,128. That's great. Thank you for sharing those numbers, because I've been trying to get the numbers from them for quite some time. Yeah, so I'm glad now that we have it recorded and official. Thank you. They're crazy busy trying to organize their lives. One of the things I said, can you share a couple of specifics? 67% women, 38% between the age of 26 and 35 with children. 29% of those women are 38 to 55 with businesses. And 33% are men under the age of 27. So they're tracking the demographics. They just got a new tool. And she was trying to figure out how to access it today. So she just said she can't get to everything, but they do have it now. And I think they're willing to share it. Oh, that's great. I appreciate you sharing that information. And thank you for that. I think clearly they've done a good job of bringing in what's probably a younger component or segment of the paleo population. Like, I've been to Paleo FX. It's a great time. There's so much going on. It's a lot of fun. So it makes sense to me that it's bringing in a good number of people and a good number of young people. Thank you so much. Great. Sorry, I really enjoyed what I saw. I got here late in the intro. What were the selection criteria for who you sent the surveys to and how many you responded and how many did you send? Yeah. Because I have a specific question about some of the data that you showed. Yeah, sure, sure. So we sent it out, we distributed over social media and we used the same 25 prominent organizations and individuals in the Paleo Sphere to promote, distribute and market the survey. We timed it for a specific release date. It ran, the 2018 survey ran for 13 days. So it was a self-selected anonymous survey. So we don't have data on the distribution of who received it versus who took it, right? So there are some definite methodological limitations to this kind of online survey, okay? Well, I was particularly interested in like one third of your responders don't believe in evolution and I wondered if the outset, did you ask a question? Do you understand this definition of evolution or what does believe in evolution mean? And for the one third that don't believe, could you elaborate on that a little bit? Sure, yeah. Absolutely, it's a great question. So we use the standard Gallup poll question and evolution that's been used for, I don't know, 20 years, 30 years. And there are three choices on that standard Gallup poll question. And one is I believe God's created humans the way they are. Number two is I believe in evolution but evolution was guided by God. And then number three is I believe like just strict evolution without any intervention from a divine force. And 66% of respondents chose the third category in our survey, right? That people believe in evolution with no divine intervention. So that's why I said strict evolution on that slide. I hope that answers your question. Okay. So it's just in light of the paleoethics numbers that just came through and the growth in products. And main question I'm having is why did fewer people complete the survey? Because to me that's the real thing that you can definitely say that completing a paleo survey is less popular this year. And it's a real question I can think of a lot of potential explanations. I wonder what you've thought about that. Sure. I do not know why fewer people complete the survey. And as I try to make clear, I'm not claiming the paleo movement is smaller because fewer people complete the survey. I am not making that claim, okay? I cannot explain why fewer people completed the survey. We tried very consciously to distribute it in the same way, but social media and internet habits have changed, right? So we tried to use all the major social media outlets to do it as we did previously. But in the end, we had far fewer responses come in. And far fewer people we contacted, let's call them influencers for lack of a better word, agreed to help promote the survey. Now, why did they refuse to promote the survey? Like, I don't know, maybe they're into keto now instead of the whole paleo thing. Or maybe I'm just a lot less popular now than I was five years ago. And people are like, oh, this Hamilton guy, he's bothering me, forget it, I'm not distributing this survey, right? I can't answer why. Sure, sure, yes.