Slashdot Mirror
The Evolution of Diet
An anonymous reader writes Here's a story from National Geographic that looks at the historical diets of people from around the world and what that diet might look like in the future. From the article: "So far studies of foragers like the Tsimane, Arctic Inuit, and Hadza have found that these peoples traditionally didn't develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease. 'A lot of people believe there is a discordance between what we eat today and what our ancestors evolved to eat,' says paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas. The notion that we're trapped in Stone Age bodies in a fast-food world is driving the current craze for Paleolithic diets. The popularity of these so-called caveman or Stone Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to eat the way hunter-gatherers did during the Paleolithic—the period from about 2.6 million years ago to the start of the agricultural revolution—and that our genes haven't had enough time to adapt to farmed foods."
What a handful of trust fund rebels indulge is a "craze?" NPR-bait — "urban foragers" and other assorted yippie nonsense.
Foodies are what emerge when a people suffer too much wealth and too much peace for too long.
Inuit have lifespan 12 to 15 years shorter than average Canadians. Hazda mean life expectancy is 65 years. Let's cut the bullshit already, live like those people and flop over dead before your time
So far studies of foragers like the Tsimane, Arctic Inuit, and Hadza have found that these peoples traditionally didn't develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease.
What's the obesity rate in those populations vis-a-vis the Western World?
Anecdote time: My family has a history of heart disease and diabetes, largely self-inflicted via eating ourselves to death. My blood markers (fasting glucose and cholesterol) follow my weight, up and down. Weight loss brought them into the normal range; dietary changes made no discernible impact whatsoever. I eat all the things that are supposedly bad for you, refined carbs, alcohol, greasy foods, and so on. The difference between me and the rest of the family is I exercise self-control and keep my net calories to a reasonable level. Reasonable ranges from 2,000 on days of doing nothing to >5,000 on days with mega hikes or long runs.
People need to stop buying into fad diets and nonsense theories. Barring allergies, most humans are fully capable of assimilating anything they throw at their GI system. Exercise some bloody portion control and get off the couch once in awhile. The rest will take care of itself.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I doubt so-called "Paleolithic diets" are anything like people ate during that.
For example, people ate fruit then, but it was seasonal, and very different from the fruit we eat today. Same with veggies. The stuff we eat is nothing like the stuff that grew in the wild.
Also, people during that age were not especially healthy. They probably died in their 40s.
The Arctic Inuit may not have high blood pressure, but what about other diseases? Is there average life span any longer than ours?
Then there is the question of physical activity. During the stone age, getting too fat and/or being too inactive, were probably the least of your worries.
Are we really willing to give up coffee, or salt on our foods?
It's like calling modern man "manhattanman" because a fraction of the world's population lives in Manhattan.
Ezekiel 23:20
Inuit in modern Canada eat less walrus and drink more beer than Inuit from three centuries ago.
So you mean a 300 gram bag of Doritos, a container of chipotle humus, two beers and a Lindt chocolate bar *isn't* what my ancestors ate?
Mostly random stuff.
The main reason "caveman" didn't die from high blood pressure is probably that something else got him first.
Human, like every animal, is built to guarantee the raise of another generation. Not more. For that, reaching the ripe age of 40 is plenty. More than plenty actually, considering that our species gets fertile around the age of 12-14 years of age (that we don't accept that 'cause we want our kids to be kids longer isn't natures fault). So actually reaching 30 should do. 40 is already a bit of a luxury and would almost enable us to get another generation raised. Some may even reach 50, or even 60 and serve as teachers to propagate learned wisdom.
Huh? Yeah, we can write now. We're talking "caveman" here, don't we?
So don't worry about high blood pressure or living unhealthy lives. You'll still get to be 30 or even 40. What more could you expect, caveman? Anything more is a luxury!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The assertion that foraging people "traditionally didn't develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease" needs a big 'Citation Needed' mark.
This Slate article does a great job of explaining how decades of peer reviewed papers on the Inuit all make the mistake of assuming lower cardiovascular disease based on a flawed assumption in a single paper in the 1970s:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
yes, those damn actuarial tables are so racist, and worse they are sexist too! Those Inuits with vaginas are living 2 to 3 years longer than those without.
Yes, and you can see the gradual increase in their lifespan over the last 100 years from that change too. Over 20 years added. Beer and pork for the win, m'boy!
live like those people and flop over dead before your time
Being that alcoholism and suicide are leading causes of death among Inuits . . . those diets must make you feel miserable, too.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That my ancestors and I are not lactose intolerant proves that most of the premise for Paleo is bullshit. My ancestors have adapted to consuming dairy more recently than the paleolithic era. As early as it could have happened would be in the neolithic era when people started domesticating goats and such. Go back to 7000 years from today and my ancestors were collecting milk, without modern refridgeration they were either making cheese or cooking it (fresh cheese, without live cultures).
I will admit that it is possible that high gluten wheat might be harmful in the continous doses we find in our modern diet. But I think more of our problems are due to the massive amounts of sugar we consume in forms that are readily processed by our bodies. Injecting sugar into your veins is probably the only way to raise your blood sugar faster than chugging a carbonated corn syrup beverage.
The idea that we have not had time to evolve to farmed food is just stupid. We've managed to completely revamp the modern pig phenotype from a slow growing lard producing machine, with back fat measuring as much as 9-12 inches to a pig where the standard backfat thickness is measured in millimeters in less than half a century. Humans have been farming for roughly 100 times longer than that.
We've seen human populations with distinct difference in their ability to handle different components of foodstuffs (lactose, gluten, fat, etc). Explain to me how that ISN'T evidence of evolution! The whole "paleo" fad is based on two false assumptions. 1) that we are no longer evolving, and 2) that evolution is directed at some idealized collection phenotypes.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
We have to go back to eating unshaven pussy......
There's an interesting book on this subject called "Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization" by Spencer Wells. Basically says that agriculture and its trappings (towns, etc) is a bad idea.
Along those lines, were paleolithic human diets composed of foods that suited an organism with a paleolithic human life span?
Inuit in modern Canada eat less walrus and drink more beer than Inuit from three centuries ago.
There lives were even shorter three centuries ago. Their low blood pressure and lack of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease may have had something to do with their diet of walrus blubber, but it just as likely was due to their lifestyle of long distance kayaking and aerobic snowshoe journeys across the ice pack. Chinese peasants also have low blood pressure and little cardiovascular disease, yet they eat a very high starch diet.
You could as easily ascribe their early demise to too much damn cold and their longer spans now by having better clothing. It isn't as simple as they live longer now because they changed their diet.
Farmed Foods? Is that what we're calling mcdonnalds, doritos, french fries, yogurt and junk food?
Seriously, if we just removed the processed crap that surrounds us everywhere, we'd all be healthy
1. Sugar (white sugar particularly which includes candy and soda, and anything else that has white sugar in it) it's refined like cocaine, not something we're supposed to eat.
2. White Flour
3. Dairy products (milk, cheese, etc)
4. White Rice (Eat brown rice people!! It's not much different! So white rice is easier to chew!!! What are we children???)
Cut out those things, and you can eat anything else you can think of. You will be your "normal weight" without even needing to work out. Your body will just work right. Do it for 3 days straight, and you'll drop weight.. do it for a few weeks and you'll be blown away.
This claim: "So far studies of foragers like the Tsimane, Arctic Inuit, and Hadza have found that these peoples traditionally didn't develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease."
Is based on studies that have been called into question recently. One researcher went so far as to call them "deeply flawed" and wondered if anyone had actually read the original studies.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
"The 2014 study has found that Inuit do have similar rates of heart disease compared to non-Inuit populations, and that death rates due to stroke are "very high." "Most of the researchers never read [the original 1970s] papers. They just took it at face value that what they said is so,"
roots, rats, rocks
I think there is something to the "Paleolithic Diet" idea, but many people are Doing It Wrong.
The prehistoric people exercised all the time, every day. They ate meat when they could get it, which wasn't 100% of the time, and the meat they got was lean. They ate fruit when they could get it, which was almost never (e.g. berries in late summer, a few dried berries other parts of the year). They ate a variety of high-fiber roots, leaves, and other gatherable food. They didn't eat any processed carbs (white flour, white sugar, etc.).
If we lived more like that, we really would be healthier.
But some people take the idea to places I don't think are good. For example, making a "paleo cake" with no processed sugar sounds good, but if it has large amounts of ground nuts and cooked fruit, and is sweetened with maple syrup... it's really not something that the prehistoric people would have eaten and I'm dubious about the benefit.
Also, it is possible for people to adapt to changing conditions in a few generations; it's not necessarily true that evolution works so slowly that the diet from 10,000 years ago is still perfect for us. TFA talked about lactose tolerance in adults. In the cave-man days there was no evolutionary advantage to being able to consume dairy as an adult, but once people started keeping livestock and harvesting dairy, that changed. Now many people can digest lactose as adults.
TL;DR Eat lean protein, complex carbs rather than simple carbs, and get lots of exercise, and you will be healthy.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The point was that modern Inuit don't eat Paleo. Not sure why you thought that was a feminist statement to protest, I think that says more about you.
How is the human race ever going to develop the genes needed for a modern diet unless we let fatty burgers, salty fries, and sugary drinks kill off the weak ones before they breed so the gene pool can improve?
If you're eating a "stone age diet," you're part of the problem.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
For all the people who believe that this is true, I think we should encourage them.
- Humans haven't evolved to travel faster than walking/riding speed, so they should eschew all forms of mechanical transport >30 mph.
- Humans haven't evolved to emotionally cope with communication without being in-person, so they need to give up cell phones
- Humans' eyes haven't evolved to cope with electronic text or really any text, so they should never read or go on the internet.
Personally, I agree, this would be a better world if they all did that. I know I'd be happier.
(in short, this is stupid; natural selection works as a RESULT of environmental and species' behavioral changes, not that we have to wait until we evolved to be able to cope with X before we can do it.)
-Styopa
Nuff said.
We shouldn't go paleo. We should go modern. Remove people from "the wild" and put them in zoos. Animals in zoos often outlive animals in the wild. The diet is part of it, but they are also not competing with other animals or fighting. So. Put people in zoos. Feed them well, and separate them if there appears to be any hostility or tension. Competition is stressful. Heart disease comes from stress. Put everybody in a zoo and let the keeper guarantee a sufficient lifestyle.
Folks, please remember that this is a "fad". There's nothing of intelligence involved in choosing the diet (might make more sense, based on some of the research I've seen, to infect themselves with parasites, as our ancestors were, to retrain their immune systems and reduce inflammation). Providing logical arguments against the "Paleo diet" to a population that has self-selected against intelligence, is, itself, not logical.
How you choose to live your life is none of our business. We wish you'd keep it that way.
"A lot of people believe there is a discordance between what we eat today and what our ancestors evolved to eat"
"The popularity of these so-called caveman or Stone Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to eat the way hunter-gatherers did during the Paleolithic..."
The emphasized words sum up the evidence backing up a "Paleo Diet"--it's a belief system, not science. We have a bevy of research to support the health benefits of foods such as legumes and whole grains and barely a scrap which suggests they cause harm. Is there a chance some future research will demonstrate that whole grains and legumes cause health problems that more than offset any potential benefits? Sure, but there's also people holding out for proof that homeopathy works.
I'm not saying you can't eat a Paleo Diet and be perfectly healthy, I'm just saying that it's pseudoscience based on an appeal to wisdom and an appeal to nature. We might also argue that humans haven't had time to evolve for wearing clothing (based off low circulating vitamin D levels) and that therefore we should definitely stop wearing them, and there is a similar paucity of research. Suffice to say: it's not science, it's a pure-and-simple belief system.
Anyone living on a foraging diet is by necessity going to require more exercise, and probably suffers from a poor diet. The exercise will lead to lower rates of high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, and cardiovascular disease - not the diet.
Its largely a result of some bad statistics on Inuit peoples in north america.
That is almost the entire basis of the diet which is insufficient to back up a thesis of this scope. And the stats in question were shown to be wrong/flawed... thus rendering the basis of the diet nonexistent.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I was only reading the other day about some "Sonic" gene.
Inuit in modern Canada eat less walrus and drink more beer than Inuit from three centuries ago.
Certainly. However, traditional Inuit culture was pretty hard on folks. Although some people did make it into their 70's, many died much earlier - often of starvation (and infectious disease whose morbidity and mortality can be strongly influenced by nutrition). Although they rarely got heart attacks (we suppose, there were rather few autopsies done on these folk) and diabetes was almost unheard of, it's hard to call a traditional Inuit elder as 'healthy'. We also really don't know how long traditional peoples typically lived - birth and death statistics were not typically kept in the hinterlands and people's recollection of events 50 years in the past tends to be hazy.
So it always amuses me that the paleo folks think that the hunter gatherer existence represented the pinnacle of human evolution.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The article does a good job of calling into question many of the Paleo claims. Yet, the slashdot summary would have you believe the claims are in fact vindicated in the article. tsk tsk
All diets evolve to include more bacon. That's progress!
this misses the fundamental concepts of evolution. Why would we ever evolve to adapt? Evolving to adapt to something that kills a species slowly is ridiculous. If a contributing evolutionary factor doesn't impact a species greatly until after child bearing years, why would it matter? Being 'kind of bad for you over 30 years' is completely irrelevant, as long as you continue as a species to have children before it affects your health in a meaningful way. As long as we eat, breed, and procreate, what it does to our general health and long term longevity is not an evolutionary topic.
TL; DR
People will never evolve past any issues that don't slow down or stop procreation. There is no need to adapt if it is not affecting a species procreation.
The main advantage of these low carb, paleo style diets give the human body a chance to switch over to long periods of ketosis which the average carb infested westerner rarely ventures into. Having your body release chemicals which scour your body looking for fat to burn must do wonders for removing plague from your arteries.
It's common knowledge that calorie restricted diets extend life expectancy. Fasting results in ketosis too. I believe long periods of ketosis is the main thing missing from most westerners lives.
Anyway, I've been doing the ketogenic diet and the cyclic ketogenic diet (carb free Monday to Friday) for nearly 12 months and it's been amazing for me. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to shed any excess pounds.
Exactly what percentage of people who die before the age of 25 have developed high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease even today? That is a middle-aged problem set even in a world where we eat shit sitting in front of the TV every damn day for 35 years.
I'm pretty sure our ancestors didn't evolve to eat corn that was licensed by Monsanto. Just a thought.
But I understand GMO foods are going to totally fix world hunger, which is why they're primarily sold in the US, where judging from the girth of people I see on the street, everybody's hungry as hell.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think the most important aspect of caveman diet was the periods of thin, unsaturated blood of high dissolving power, called periods of starvation, once in a while, as far as cardiovascular disease goes. So instead of hitting the gym and starving your blood supply from nutrients by exercising too much, and wearing your body down with it, exercise only until you build and tone muscle without dragging the body through the starved mode, and for the starved mode artery cleaning simply starve, like don't eat nothing for 2 days at a time, once every 2 months or so. It's not that difficult or complicated, and it's cheaper than all that cardiovascular medication. In fact it's better if you do it monthly, or weekly, or daily. For instance, for a long time I had a habit of eating once a day, eating a whole lot, then not eating again for a whole day, and that allows for periods of blood thinness, as opposed to the habits of potato chip snackers, where it's not really the trans fat that kills - as even mother's milk has trans fat - but the constant snacking and keeping the blood saturated, to where temporary amorphous fat deposits get a chance to crystallize and become tough biofilm with the bacteria in blood, so they can no longer be redissolved. In fact garlic or heavy antibiotics might, might be able to break up biofilms but then you still have the relatively toughly crystallized cholesterol soap + fat cargo deposits, for which a good chest pounding or muscle pounding boxing match could loosen up. The questions are as simple as solubility in blood, biofilms, and mechanical shaking. Maybe they'll invent an ultrasound catheter they can stick down the arteries into a beating heart, and shake loose the crud, without an open heart surgery. But the issues are large fragments getting loose in the fat aorta, and getting stuck in the hair thin blood vessels of the brain and leg muscles, where the blood plumbing conduits are not so large.
Also, getting yourself very drunk to near death alcohol levels might help solubilize some of the cholesterol fat deposits easier during periods of starvation, but that has downsides to it too.
That's not fully informed -- In general, the average life expectancy of these people is dragged down by unusually-high infant and child mortality, and to a lesser extent unnatural early mortality in adults due to lifestyle hazards and both issues exacerbated by limited or no access to modern medicine. When these people survive those additional hazards, life expectancy is similar to those who live a more "Western" lifestyle.
But life expectancy is not really the point here -- health and quality of life is far more apropos -- In that measure, these people "outlive" the average Westerner in spades, regardless of how old they are when they kick the bucket.
The paper missed the omega 3 / omega 6 imbalance, which helps explaining why eating a lot of meat did not cause heart diseases and cancer up to the middle ages while it does now (hint: that meat was not fed with omega-6 rich plants such as soy).
The notion that we haven't had time to "evolve" to adapt to a modern diet is a bit absurd. Because here we are: eating it and living as much as a century on it. It doesn't take millions of years for natural selection to eliminate genetic lines that can't thrive on a particular diet; the mere thousands in which humans switched from hunter-gatherers into farmers has been enough. That doesn't mean that the rapid biotechnological change of the past century or two hasn't produced a diet that we can all do well on – high fructose corn syrup and factory-raised meat are putting a whole new set of selection criteria on H. sapiens – but the typical diet of the 19th century, with a corresponding level of physical activity, plus some modern medical technology to address illnesses that aren't related to nutrition, is the best prescription for human longevity.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Those two weak to continue a nomadic lifestyle would often just walk off into the tundra or sit otherwise beyond on a pile of rocks, consigning themselves to fate for the sake of their counterparts. Such death treks are liable to occur faster in times of scarcity, when caches of meat or fish would preferentially go to those most likely to survive. One struck with a chronic disease which affected their long-term outlook over a harsh winter would be self (or group) selected to die of exposure before overcome with weakness.
"Are we really willing to give up coffee, or salt on our foods?"
I don't know about you- but I stopped adding coffee on my pizza a long time ago.
There is a simple, easy to follow diet that will prevent you from developing any age-related diseases. Just eat as much as you like of whatever you like, plus a lethal dose of poison when you turn ~30. You will not get any of the age-related diseases, much like people in the old days when hardly anyone died from age-related causes. If you want to be even healthier, get rid of all the devices that save you physical labor and grow/hunt your own food, plus if you don't cheat by using fertilizers and irrigation you'll automatically go on a year-long diet every so often.
Or, you could avoid foods that are low on fiber or high in fructose, and occasionally exercise.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
There's no comparison. They didn't have access to modern medicine, government, food banks, etc. My point wasn't that Paleo man lived far longer than modern man, just that you can't say "modern Inuit have short life spans" and from there say "the old Inuit diet was unhealthy."
They also made tasty snacks for polar bears.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Sure, this is a fair comparison. What difference could a couple centuries of colonialism make?
The October 2013 issue of Scientific American had an article named "Long Live the Humans". It concerned why humans live so long. Part of the authors analysis was the radiological examination of as many mummies as they could find from all over the world. What that showed was a distribution of chronic diseases very similar to modern populations. This argues against the premise that diet is the root of modern chronic diseases. The article argues they are genetic in their origin.
Here is a link to the article. It is only a preview, they want to to give them money to read it. A point I find reasonable.
http://www.scientificamerican....
Everyone wants to go back to the dawn of time to study what "they used to eat". How about more recent times?
What percentage of calories per day were provided by alcohol from 800-1700 AD in Europe?
My guess, for 95% of population would be 95% alcohol, of one sort or another. Beer/mead for the cheap seats.
Infant mortality had more to do with low average lifespans in the past - you can have a vast majority of people who make it to adulthood live into their 80s, and still have an average lifespan of 30 years, if 10 children die before they make a year old for every 1 that makes it past.
We tend to make the assumption that an average lifespan of 30 means that nobody lives past 35 years old - but that's simply not the case.
http://unlocked-wordhoard.blog...
"Consider this: If we accept as a given that the average life expectancy of the Middle Ages was 25, then life expectancy has tripled, right? Since we know from both historical and archaeological records that some people lived to 80+ years in the Middle Ages, wouldn't that mean that people are living three times as long? Shouldn't there be some 240 year olds running around, grousing that things just aren't the same since Thomas Jefferson died?
And therein lies the problem. Even if the statistic is accurate, people hear something very different than the statistic is saying. A stat talking about life expectance tripling is about the average tripling, but the way it is popularly perceived is that the length of time people live has tripled. And, of course, it isn't. If you're old enough to read this, a century from now you'll be dead, no matter how much life expectancy rises."
It's not so much "the pinnacle of evolution" (whatever the heck that means), but rather the diet that we were evolved to eat. Many animals are evolved to eat all sorts of things that we are not. We would die quickly if we ate what they ate, and they would die quickly if they ate what we do. But the point is, we should eat what we're evolved to eat. That's probably not coca-cola and crisps.
> It's not so much "the pinnacle of evolution" (whatever the heck that means), but rather the diet that we were evolved to eat.
Our guts can digest some raw vegetables but not a diet that is primarily based on them. But there is no evidence that the use of fire for externalised digestion (i.e. cooking) may go back anything up to one million years. This would then suggest that this evolution includes, for the last million years at least, cooked food that might include cooked vegetable matter.
In any case evolution selects for the ability for a group (in the case of social animals) to reproduce. Unless living to over 50 offers a big advantage to a group (wisdom or childcare) then the selection pressure is low, so dying of a heart attack at 50 if it means you are more vigorous at half that age could be an advantage. Since people would rather live to older than 50 these days then eating a diet we evolved to eat might not be desirable.
The foods our ancestors consumed don't really exist anymore. No, really, that broccoli you're eating didn't exist back in their times, and the ancestor of the broccoli plant that they ate bears little resemblance to the vegetable today. They didn't eat fatty cuts of meat, they ate super-lean meat when they could catch it. They didn't eat onion and garlic fried in olive (or coconut) oil. If they found carrots, they weren't anywhere near as large, sweet, or nutrient-rich as the ones you buy in a supermarket. Here's an archaeologist talking about it.
So given that we can't eat the diet our ancestors consumed, why discount an enormous range of foods that we have created because some others we have created (through very selective breeding) evoke some "natural" ideal? It's not difficult to argue that eating excessive quantities of deep-fried starchy food is bad for you, but that's not cause to throw out grainy breads as well. You can try arguing that coconut oil is good for you, but there isn't enough research on the subject available to conclusively decide one way or the other yet - or we would've decided already.
The argument that you can eat "what we evolved to eat" is an appeal to nature, essentially. It's not possible to eat what we ate 150,000 years ago without putting a lot of effort into finding some really crappy meals. Paleo is a fad diet which may not be harmful, but its rules are as arbitrary as any others.
I read the first book that come out and started the whole paleo diet thing. I read it on the "installment plan" at Borders Book: one coffee mocha from their cafe for every 50 pages. (Yes, is probably would have cost the same to just buy the book!). Anyway, about 25-50 page (one mocha) in I had suspicions. 5 or 6 mochas later, it was confirmed. Not one mention of eating insects! Insects are fairly common foodstuffs worldwide, but not in Western civilizations. I suspect your typical homo pre-refridgeratus while stolling his or her 17 miles a day would consider a cicada, grasshopper of cockroach nice snack. Maybe with some ant paste sauce.
Further reading on the original had a vague sense that the paleo diet they were proposing could easily be adapted to a Kosher diet. Don't wanta lose those Orthodox Readers!
In spite of these criticisms, I still the the concept alluring. And, when I stroll down the aisles of my local Anglo Supermarket in Los Angeles, I go aisle after aisle of potato chips, canned this or that, Ramen noodle cup, pre-packaged this or that, and ask myself, where's the food?
By food I mean animals and mostly vegetables, nuts included, not to mention insects. Even then, the animals and vegetables are different than what our ancestors were eating. Although bigger changes in vegetables. Fruit especially was much different, tending 'back then' to be drier, smaller, and tarter. However, when I eat quasi-paleo (look up the "Spanish Diet," a low carb Mediterrainean mash-up) I lose weight, feel much better, and blood chemistry improves. And when I go out to eat I amazed at how salty and sweet most restaurant food is. But look at what our mass-market industrial society is feeding us, or tries to feed us. Say "moo," consumer.
I don't remember how many times I have come across the idea that evolution has somehow stopped dead in its tracks for humanity; and here we see it again. It is perhaps an easy mistake to make - after all, we haven't seen much, obvious change in our species with our own eyes, and we also like to think of ourselves at the epitome of evolution, so how could we possibly become better?
The truth of the matter is that our species changes all the time, and we are very complex creatures. One part of what a human is, has only really been recognised recently: the community of micro-organisms that live in our bodies, which interacts with and even modifies us, affecting our moods and influencing our metabolisms etc. This community of micro-organisms changes very rapidly with diet, and it has a huge influence on what is the optimal diet, which is lucky, because it helps us deal with new kinds of food. We might not be able to live on the kind of crap we eat in the West if not for that.
So, the more intelligent question to ask ourselves is, what kind microbes would it be best to encourage to live in our guts, and what kind of food should we eat to do that?
Also, getting yourself very drunk to near death alcohol levels might help solubilize some of the cholesterol fat deposits easier during periods of starvation, but that has downsides to it too
Good idea !
But I think there ought to be a better way to dissolved the fatty deposits along the veins than getting seriously drunk
While fatty acids does dissolve in alcohol, alcohol is far from being the only solvent that can dissolve cholesterol
Perhaps someone could come up with something that can dissolve the cholesterol buildup in the veins while not getting the person into a serious drunken stage
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Do you have any records to say they died in their 40s ?
And even if we had birth certifcates and date of deaths for everyone living on Earth 100 000 years ago how can we compare life expectancy ?
We have doctors, antibiotics, hospitals, X rays and generally we can find easily food without putting our lives at stake.
They had just some stones to compete with beasts like cave lion.
What would be the life expectancy of an obese US citizen put back in the past? A few hours maybe...
I highly suspect that if they weren't in good health we shouldn't be here.
"The popularity of these so-called caveman or Stone Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to eat the way hunter-gatherers did during the Paleolithic—the period from about 2.6 million years ago to the start of the agricultural revolution—and that our genes haven't had enough time to adapt to farmed foods."
We've evolved widespread lactose tolerance in a couple of thousand years and I'm supposed to believe that we haven't figured out wheat in 7000? We're apparently evolving so women can successfully have children later in life, and that's been going on for maybe two generations.
So I call BS.
BS like every other fad diet. I'm not *that* old, and have no interest in diets, and I've already seen the bread diet craze, the water diet, pineapple diet, low-fat diet, no-carb diet and now caveman diets. Every single one of these had plausible sounding excuses for why they would work that went something along the lines of "well your body [insert technobabble] so if you eat [insert types of food] you'll feel full while losing weight!"
And that's in my lifetime. If one looks even a *little* harder (which is all I've done, read one article on it years ago), you'll see this has been going on since people weren't continually starving to death, so basically the last couple of hundred years. For instance, about 400 (300?) years ago everything was mushy gains and/or covered in gravy. That's because "well, your stomach is a bakery, thats why it's warm, so we want to eat things that help the baking process". Then about 200 years ago we realized that was totally wrong. What you want to eat is meat and potatoes, because "well your stomach is a brewery, that's why you burp, so we want things that decompose down into liquids".
"It sounds like it should be that way" is not science, and turns out to be wrong most of the time. I suspect this latest fad will die just as quickly as all the other ones.
Hunter gatherers preferentially ate the fattiest parts of the animal - organs, brains etc. Lean meat was often feed to dogs as it's low value.
Also considering the harsher and harder conditions are, the harder it is to survive. It could be that anyone that would get heart issues, or diabetes, or a host of other things, would simply die off earlier. Considering many of these things are to known to at least be in part genetic, if you die off before you have a chance to have kids, well those genetic traits might just be a bit rarer than in other cultures. Only the strong survive so to speak.
I'm a bit puzzled/worried about the sources of information. Got interested in the Nochmani diet that's very heavy in insects according to the article, so I googled them. The only mention of the tribe is a fake NG article (http://berkman.bol.ucla.edu/Nochmani.pdf) used for an experiment in neuroscience (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3025747/). Am I misunderstanding something or was research for the article done by googling and accepting the content of the first link as a fact?
Do you have a citation for trans-fat in human milk? I'm pretty sure that humans only produce cis-fat. Perhaps you meant mono-unsaturated fat (can be either in the cis or trans conformation)?
Also, atherosclerotic plaques don't typically contain bacteria and wouldn't be considered a biofilm. I think you are getting confused with bacterial myocarditis (can happen with Lyme disease or other bacterial infections).
Why do other ethnic groups in that same cold live much longer? Remember the claims made by the article are about their present diet (which still is meat and fat mostly) and lack of certain diseases, when the truth is they don't have those diseases because they are flopping over dead sooner than everyone else.
live like those people and flop over dead before your time
Being that alcoholism and suicide are leading causes of death among Inuits . . . those diets must make you feel miserable, too.
It's not the diet. It's the poverty of the aboriginal communities, high unemployment, and maybe a bit of seasonal affective disorder. The 6 months of darkness take a toll.
"So far studies of foragers like the Tsimane, Arctic Inuit, and Hadza have found that these peoples traditionally didn't develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease."
What is really odd is all of those are symptoms of something else besides diet. Maybe their excellent health had something more to do with say..their constant exercise? All they did was walk or run. They didn't get off the couch to go to the car, walk 50 feet then sit in a chair all day, then walk another 50 feet get in their car then go back to the couch.
This idea that "I can sit on my fat ass watching my TV and still be healthy if all I eat are nuts" is..nuts.
You're wrong about the cuts of meat - specifically, they ate ORGAN meats, and threw away muscle to the dogs if anything.
http://rdk.deadbsd.org/electri...
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
Nope.
"The cadavers in the van belong to men, women and children who perished along this stretch of coastal desert as much as 1,800 years ago, long before the Spanish conquest."
1800 years ago... not paleolithic!
I see the diet is largely misunderstood, but then it is too by brash paleo enthusiasts. There are no hard and fast rules as to how much meat should be consumed - if anything vegetables are consistently the most emphasized across all championed diets. Those who rationalize gross meat consumption for their 'optimal' diet are usually bodybuilders whom occasionally identify as paleo. It's hard to blame them as meat surely helps build strength and testosterone levels, though you may reach the grave a bit quicker - caloric restriction is well correlated with increased lifespan. As for grains, while they've only been adopted with the advent of agriculture, our ancestors (the later ones) knew enough to soak them and prepare them properly for better digestion and nutritional absorption, a habit we've since lost, and you can be sure anything out of a box (refined grains) are bad for you.
You won't find one vibrant traditional culture that doesn't eat meat, as per Weston A Price's observations, even in areas where it is more sparse. In those instances, meat consumption tends to be consumed not long before sex.
Just because there's less or no marbling in wild game doesn't mean that "lean meat" was all they ate. Toward fall, wild game carry a lot of fat. And from what I've read, the fatty tissues were the most-prized portions, and consumed first -- being not only the most calorie-dense, but more prone to spoilage with time (fats go rancid, while meat can be preserved by drying).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"They didn't eat fatty cuts of meat, they ate super-lean meat when they could catch it."
I take it you've never butchered a whitetail deer. Or a raccoon, a squirrel, a pigeon, or a dove, to name a sampling of wild animals not changed by breeding programs-- essentially the same as they were 150k years ago. There's plenty of fat in wild game. In fact, the lean muscle meats where generally the last part of the animals that people ate. First they ate the liver. Then they ate the other offal and brains, including the large globs of abdominal fat. And catching wild animals is really not that hard.
Also, there are hundreds of edible plants which have not been farmed and selected by breeding programs over the millennia, such as cat tail, sea weeds, stinging nettle, and black walnuts.
It is less about being strictly "paleo" and more about eating what we are genetically evolved to eat. It is not grains, starches, and sugar. Period. Not only do they offer little to no nutritonal value, but they are harmful. I have never dieted in my entire life, but have been eating primally for almost 2 years now. I've never felt better, and am in much better health now. I weighed 170 my entire adult life, but dropped 15 pounds by just eliminating those things from my diet. Just read "why we get fat and what to do about it", "the primal blueprint" and "grain brain". Watch Dr Peter Attia's video on the standard american diet on Vimeo. Drop your preconceived notions, educate yourself. Hopefully you will improve your life and never look back.
If you're worried about hardening of the arteries, consider supplementing with K2. Typically until recently there was more of it in our diets than we get now, since a major source is from animals that have fed on fresh green grass (and eggs from such), and our livestock and chickens are much more grain fed now. Also, if you're prone to black circles under your eyes, as I am, it might make them disappear, as it did for me.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
And anything "wild" or that you can forage for today like mushrooms, moss, lichen, even huckleberries.
I wonder if in 50 years we'll see the same legal actions and moral conscience swing towards processed food makers as the late 20th century saw towards tobacco companies.
I have come to the same conclusion. I believe a lot of ailments are caused by lack of stress on the entire unit. I believe that people who easily put on body fat are actually more advanced in the sense that historically we had many struggles to maintain a steady food source. If you can convert calories to fat easily it would obviously give you a leg up in survival. I too go a day or two without and change up from three or four meals down to a single etc. I don't even notice being hungry. One other thing I would like to mention is fats treated to be stable at room temperature. Of all the things that could possibly be plugging up our arteries I believe this is the culprit. Just seems common sense. Fat and oil was the most efficient form of calories and was harvested from every possible source for survival. We must be able to handle all that no problem, but these fats that are used in packaging must plug you up.
fats go rancid, while meat can be preserved by drying
Saturated fats don't go rancid. By wild game, I presume you are talking about mammals, which contain only saturated fat in sufficient amount to be able to distinguished from other parts and "consumed first".
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Disclaimer: The following is not an expert opinion, and almost certainly fouls up technical names involved:
Not arguing that the paleo diet is correct, but I'm not sure 'eating what we evolved to eat' in-and-of-itself is a fallacy by appeal to nature, much less a fallacy at all - our bodies have evolved certain proteins, enzymes, processes, and what-have-you which interlink in specific ways both internally to the digestive system and externally to other bodily systems (notably, by common problems, the cardiac and adipose/energy storage) in order to keep the whole system running, and keeping the whole system running is best done by eating those things in some set of proportions which allows our body to appropriately handle the lifecycle of that resource within the body, ie, 'eating what we evolved to eat'. This does have some further caveats, involving affordability; availability; individuality; and the ability to discover the optimal with precision, but as a general rule, my point that "'eating what we evolved to eat' is not erroneous" should be considered to hold.
I think a better way to understand the error of Paleo-practitioners is to say that they are committing the composition/division fallacy described here on the site you linked, in that they assume that what was good for humans then is good for humans now, despite 150k years of evolution, combined with a possible appeal to nature in assuming that what those humans ate was indeed the best diet for those humans (I do not know enough about the results of research performed in that field, and I have not reviewed argument in that area enough to make a claim either way).
the carrots weren't orange either...
It's different enough to be insidious. Cigarettes are bad for people. They're quite visible. People don't need them. They have serious effects on people other than the smoker. It's easy to discount all positive value (although some people apparently find them very useful for self-medicating some mental illnesses). Cigarette manufacturers lied for a long time about the harmful effects. Cigarettes are addictive, so smoking even one is dangerous.
Processed food is, well, food. It isn't necessarily all that distinguishable (I looked at some protein drinks once, and the only place I found saying they were mostly sugar water was the mandated ingredients and nutrients list.) People need food, and eating in public and private is considered natural and doesn't harm nearby people. In general, processed food manufacturers don't have to lie to get people to eat their stuff (with some exceptions like those protein drinks), they just don't mention health effects. Eating one doughnut every so often isn't going to cause significant harm.
To get the same actions, we're going to have to get a subtler awareness into the public, and that's going to take time. We need to publicize the dangers of such food a lot, and that's going to face a lot of opposition. (Smokers didn't usually want to hear bad things about their tobacco.) We need sound, bulletproof science piled higher and higher.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes