Paleo vs whole food diets

Sometimes when I'm out doing more or less mindless things, I sort of zone out and random thoughts pop into my head that I don't think I would have ever thought of otherwise. A couple of days ago I was shoveling another UTV load of soil, and I thought about the whole food diet in a completely different light: this diet (including "healthy whole grains") is essentially the neolithic diet.

Modern food with tons and tons of sugar and carbs is clearly bad for you, and this is evident by the poor health of so many Americans and (to a lesser extent) other Westerners. So moving back to the diets of 50-100 years ago is certainly an improvement. But what evidence is there to support choosing the neolithic diet over the paleolithic diet? To the best of my knowledge, the evidence is actually strongly the other way - the change to the neolithic diet thousands of years ago was comparable to the recent change to the 'modern diet' in it's effects, if not more so. Stunted growth, bad teeth, weak bones, etc. It was the original "modern diet", Modern Diet 1.0 as opposed to the Modern Diet 2.0 AKA SAD.

Bread is the original processed food.

I think if more westerners ate more whole foods they would be undeniably healthier. However, we all know that is not enough. The way we grow said foods needs to improve as well. What passes for produce in the grocery stores is sad and food is selected based on how well it ships rather than how nutritious to tasty it is. Sensitive foods also cost a fortune (see good tomatoes). Grain is iffy in my book. It's really hard to tell if it is good for us because a lot of the grain available has been hybridized or genetically modified for more calories per acre and an increase in gluten.

Currently I am growing grains along with veggies. My operation is very small, but I am still determined to try out garden fresh grains and see how they taste (one of the biggest signs of nutritious value).

@Jim T: " ....random thoughts pop into my head that I don't think I would have ever thought of otherwise. "

".....domestication may be seen as a calamity for human ontogeny, against which subsequent history is marked by cultural efforts to recover a mature perspective without giving up the centralization of power made possible by unleashed fecundity and urban huddling. In this sense, history is characterized as the self-contradictory will to recover the grace and poise of the mature individual, initially reduced to a shambles by the neolithic, without giving up the booty." --Paul Shepard, "Nature and Madness".

Moving from just junk food and take out to home cook white rice and flour is a huge improvement.
That said Whole grain food really necessitate grains, which is anti-paleo. Really I would just start with drinking at least 1 gallon of water a day, and a 1lbs+ of leafy green, 8hrs of sleep, after that you are 80% there.

Even pre-Paleos were having to make informed food choices:

...

In the world of today there are many different "diets" being touted as healthy diets. The main problem I see with all of these "fad" diets is that in order to actually follow their premises, you must have access to the proper foods and these foods must have been grown without chemicals of any kind, from ancient sourced seeds, in true healthy, living soil. Most of the people I have met that talk about the greatness of these diets, actually get their foods from grocery stores, this precludes their ability to actually follow the diet they proclaim as healthy.

Breads of the ancient cultures did not have the gluten in the grain that we have today thanks to modern agriculture. If you aren't growing your own grains and grinding them yourself, you are getting increased amounts of gluten.

Rice of this day and age is not the same as rice that was grown even 100 years ago, much less 1000 years ago.

There are some that are working to bring back the low gluten grains but it takes time since it is hard to get more than 1 pound of the seed needed to establish the ability to grow and still have enough seed to both plant and grind to flour.