NOTES: The Paleo Diet: The Ancestral Margin Call

# Eulogy for the Bone Broth Bubble: The Caveman is Cactus

It’s over. The whole ancestral LARP. I can smell the desperation from here, a thin, cold odour of pine and burnt capital drifting out of Boulder, Colorado.

For two decades, we watched tech bros pay $18 a pound for grass-fed bison, all while secretly wishing they could just take a pill. Well, the pill arrived. And the whole flimsy narrative collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane.

I get the appeal, I do. The fear is real. I feel it myself—that slight tremor in the hand, the phantom itch of biological decay. The quiet, creeping terror that the body’s balance sheet is deep in the red.

The Official Story (The Bluth Family Pitch)

For twenty years, they sold us a beautiful, simple lie. They called it the “Evolutionary Discordance Hypothesis,” which is corporate-speak for: “Your body is a vintage car that stopped getting updates 10,000 years ago.”

The pitch was that we were genetically perfect machines, stalled in the Pleistocene. The cure for modernity wasn't innovation, but a high-priced regression to a $14 bag of dehydrated beef liver.

It was a classic, internecine Bluth family scam. A promise that there’s always money in the bone broth stand, as long as you pretend you can’t digest a slice of bloody toast.

The Real Story (The Biological Margin Call)

Yeah, nah. The bill’s come due. The whole thing’s gone cactus, and here’s why.

* The Peptide Eraser: Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly rolled out an oral GLP-1 agonist. A pill. It does the one thing the Paleo cult promised—effortless weight loss—without the grueling, high-friction misery. The market didn’t just correct; it was liquidated. The digital ghosts of those “ancestral” CPG brands now haunt the dark web, their Shopify stores flickering like dying neon in a Shinjuku back-alley.

* The Human Cost: This was never just a business failure; it was a biological payday loan. The fine print, written in arterial plaque and brittle femurs, is now coming to light. We’re seeing “Stone Age” fractures in 40-year-old biohackers from the chronic calcium debt. Their guts, starved of the fibre from grains and legumes, have turned on themselves, pumping out heart-scarring TMAO.

* The Great Pivot: And the bio-influencers who got rich off this? They’re skint. They’ve scrubbed the caveman cosplay from their feeds, pivoting to “metabolic flexibility” supplements with the speed of a spook deleting an asset. They’re cashing out before the bankruptcy is finalised, leaving their followers holding a bag of very expensive, nutrient-deficient jerky.

The Bottom Line

We were sold a fantasy of control over our own decay. A way to cosplay as apex predators while being terrified of a bad cholesterol reading.

It reminds me of Tokyo in 2018. That feeling of unprotected exposure in the humidity, the vague dread that the system is too vast, too impersonal, and you’re just a single, fragile data point caught in its gears.

Paleo was never about health. It was a 20-year marketing short squeeze on human insecurity. The bubble didn’t just burst; it was systematically dismantled by a better technology.

The ledger is balanced. The debt, however, compounds.