“Live long, drop dead!” is the motto of the primal living crowd, a group of motley 20- to 60-somethings who gathered this spring in Oxnard, Calif., for PrimalCon, a weekend of nutrition education, “natural exercise,” cooking demos, and low-carb feasting.
Mark Sisson is the blonde, buff leader of this crowd, which had gathered based on its interest in the “paleo” or “caveman” diet. Sisson is a blogger and the founder of a nutrition company who has sold close to half a million copies of his self-published Primal Blueprint and has since released a series of additional guidebooks and cookbooks. In a nutshell — and nuts are key here — primal living is popular. But is it green? I tried out the diet and attended PrimalCon in an effort to find out.
Primal 101
The theory behind living long and dropping dead is simple, if a bit reductionist. The reason we Westerners get fat, sluggish, and sick, spending our final days wasting away in wheelchairs, is because we’ve been disconnected from our evolutionary program, or “primal blueprint.”
“We live in a very different world from our evolutionary roots,” says Sisson. “Luckily there is a map to flourish ver... Read more
