The Paleo diet has trounced the competition

As anyone who knows anything about statistics will tell you, you can't just draw conclusions from the data. There are a lot of possible reasons behind this interesting set of Google search trend activity regarding popular diets. But it is certainly interesting to see the strong surge in popularity for the Paleo diet, and its continued growth compared to some diets which seem to have peaked and plateaued.

In 2011, searches for the Paleo diet topped those for South Beach, Master Cleanse and the Mediterranean diet. In 2012, Paleo managed to overtake Atkins. And as the search results show, interest in gluten free, the Skinny Bitch (vegan) diet, and the raw food diet were - as it turns out - never that popular to begin with.

The most obvious thing to point out here is that it measures search results, not participation. These numbers reflect the amount of times people used Google to search for "Paleo diet." I suspect this is because the Paleo diet is not just weird and sensational (with its bizarre insistence on pinning the whole thing to somewhat shaky theories of evolutionary biology), but also because there isn't really a canonical book on the diet.

Most other fad diets start with a book and enter the mainstream that way. The book's author gets invited on various talk shows, the book is reviewed in the mainstream press, and the word of mouth all flows from that publishing event. But while there are certainly a whole slew of books about the Paleo diet, there is no single canonical text, and the whole thing basically "lives" online.

This brings me to my next point, which is that anecdotally, the Paleo diet seems to attract the sort of person (white males 18-25 who enjoy bickering over nutritional minutia) who is most likely to spend a lot of time Googling things (and arguing with what they find). I've said it before: The biggest hurdle the Paleo diet faces in its road to public acceptance is Paleo diet fanatics, who frankly are often intolerable. The diet itself is very sensible (if a huge change from the standard American diet), but Paleo evangelists can be off-putting at best.

Image of a Banksy graffiti piece courtesy Flickr/Lord Jim