Research paper
Eaton SB, Konner M. Paleolithic nutrition: A consideration of its nature and current implications. New England Journal of Medicine. 1985;312(5):283-289. doi:10.1056/NEJM198501313120505
Why we cite it
A 1985 New England Journal of Medicine paper reconstructing the probable diet of late paleolithic humans from paleontological, archaeological and ethnographic evidence, and comparing it with modern industrialised diets.
The authors’ own claim, hedged as they hedge it: differences between ancestral and modern dietary patterns ”appear to have important implications for health”, and the ancestral diet ”may be a reference standard for modern human nutrition and a model for defense against certain ‘diseases of civilization'” — the paper’s own scare quotes. Their method is offered as ”a rational basis for estimating what human beings are genetically ‘programmed’ to eat.”
THREE CLAIMS REMOVED FROM THIS SECTION (corrected 2026-09-06, card E1AWST). Superseded wording:
> Landmark paper that established the scientific foundation for evolutionary approaches to nutrition… argued that the mismatch… is a principal cause of chronic “diseases of civilization.” … it brought the evolutionary mismatch concept from anthropology into mainstream medicine and provided the intellectual framework that later “paleo” dietary movements built upon.
1. Hedge erosion. ”Is a principal cause” is flat where every corresponding sentence in the paper is qualified — appear to, may be, certain, estimating. The authors propose a reference standard; they do not assign a principal cause.
2. A term the paper does not use. ”Mismatch” occurs zero times in the held full text, as does ”discordance”. The idea is theirs; the word is later vocabulary read back onto them, and it carries a confidence their phrasing does not.
3. Two impact claims that nothing here can check — what the paper established for a field, what it brought into mainstream medicine, and what later ”paleo” dietary movements built on. These are claims about the subsequent history of a discipline, not about a paper this library holds. The word paleolithic appears about 30 times in the text and refers to the epoch. (The held text is an OCR scan, so the count is approximate: 26 to 30 depending on how words broken across lines are rejoined, and the scan misreads at least one as Paleotithic. Corrected 2026-09-10 from an exact 28.) The diet movement appears nowhere in it.
What is checkable and sufficient: it was published in the NEJM, it reconstructs a paleolithic diet from named evidence classes, and it proposes that diet as a reference standard. Cite it for that.