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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."
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!
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.
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,"
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
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
Nuff said.
The idea that we have not had time to evolve to farmed food is just stupid.
No, it's an interesting hypothesis. The thing is, nobody has bothered testing it (in any meaningful way) so it's just that: a hypothesis. Unfortunately, an unsupported hypothesis has never stopped a fad diet before.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
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.
"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.
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 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,
By active gene manipulation through selective breeding. We do the same to our crops and produce. I think the term when applied to humans is "eugenics". We could create a super race of humans IF we kept the inferior humans from producing and encouraged the superior, just as we do with pigs. Maybe some day when the aliens with the book "To Serve Humans" show up and cart a bunch of us off to their planet we'll see a demonstration of that.
What we HAVE been able to do by avoiding eugenics with humans while applying modern medicine is to make less robust humans. In the "good old days", if you couldn't see the sabre tooth tiger coming to eat you, your bad eye genes didn't propagate into the rest of the population. Now that eye glasses are common, weak eyes are not selected against on a regular basis, and the genes that lead to them are spread.
The same goes for many medical conditions where our compassion has kept people with bad genes alive long enough to procreate. That's the basis for genetics and evolution, so you can't really say that it isn't happening.
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!
Because we've not allowed the driving mechanism for evolution to act when it comes to humans. What you are seeing is the survival of detrimental mutations or maladaptations, not natural selection against them. For example, an inability to handle HFCS in part of the population has not driven evolution to make humans more able to handle them in our processed foods, because we don't let the people who are maladapted die, we give them medicines to keep them alive and having children.
We fight to the death to keep evolution from adapting us, while using it on a regular basis to make our animals and foods better.
Ok, I agree with most of those, but how is dairy products processed? People been drinking milk and making cheese for centuries
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.
Researchers have been studying human evolution by tracking changes in our DNA and using advanced modeling techniques to gauge the rate of our evolution, including projecting various changes backward in time. That's how we know that Neanderthals and modern humans bred with each other. We've found the Neanderthal genes in the modern human population. Most genes contribute to more than one trait, so even small changes in our DNA can lead to large changes in our phenotype. To assume that somehow those changes have magically skipped over affecting any of the numerous genes involved in ingestion, digestion, and metabolizing our food is asinine.
Our ability to support the energy sink that is the human brains is dependent upon our ability to get enough nutrients, and more importantly energy, to support its development and high maintenance requirements as an adult. That it self is evidence of our diet and bodies evolving together. Also, the reduction in the size of our jaws, leading to chronic problems with impacted 3rd molars, is another instance where we have evolved as a result of our diet. The larger jaws of earlier hominids are not necessary because we cook our food. That cooking makes the nutrients more available, meaning we need to eat less. It also makes the food softer, meaning we don't need massive jaws to constantly grind seeds and roots and raw meat.
There is plenty of other evidence that our bodies have evolved in large part BECAUSE of changes in what we eat and how we prepare it. The problem is that fad dieters have never been very big on reading peer-reviewed literature. They prefer to read the book-of-the-month endorsed by some celebrity or health guru.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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.
Yeah like that health nut Dr. Walford who claimed he was going to live to be 150 on calorie restricted diet. Well, he sure avoided any chance of cardio disease when he flopped over dead at slightly less than average lifespan for US citizen. ah well, it's the thought that counts
By active gene manipulation through selective breeding.
True, and that is why we've made so much progress in such a short period of time with pigs. However, to assume that natural selection cannot accomplish in 4000 years, what we've done through selective breeding in ~40 years is odd to me. In humans there isn't some intelligence applying the selection, but that does not mean that selection is not taking place. The difference is that the environment, consisting in part of the food that can be cultivated in that environment, is applying the selection pressure. Most humans can utilize lactose well into adulthood because we evolved the ability to do so because the offspring of humans who could were more likely to survive and breed. The ability to digest lactose as an adult is not as advantageous as it once was, and in the absence of that selective pressure the trait is becoming less universal. Both the historical spread of lactose tolerance and the current rise of lactose intolerance are examples of evolution in action.
What we HAVE been able to do by avoiding eugenics with humans while applying modern medicine is to make less robust humans
No, humans are not less robust, at least in an evolutionary sense, because evolution is all about survival in the environment as it is at the moment. It is not about some theoretical ideal or past conditions that no longer apply. It is inconvenient that one my sons is lactose intolerant, sure, but he lives in a time and place where the ability to digest lactose does not affect his long term prospects of reproduction appreciably. Similarly, it would have been nice for early sailors to be able to synthesize vitamin C on their own, but they couldn't and that led to a lot of brave men suffering and sometimes dying of scurvy before they realized that eating citrus fruits or extracts can prevent it (even before medicine realized what it was about citrus that prevented scurvy). Humans have always used our intelligence to think our way out of apparent maladaptions to our environment. The net effect has been to show that our greater intelligence is a more valuable adaptation that big teeth, claws, and a vitamin C synthetic pathway in the liver.
...has kept people with bad genes alive...[emphasis mine]
There are no "bad" genes. There are traits which are not well adapted to a particular environment or situation, but that does not make them bad per se. Sickle cell being the poster child for an apparent disorder this actually advantageous under certain conditions. Same goes for white skin, and advantage that evolved and spread in colder northern europe, but is a hindrance to whites living in regions with plenty of UV exposure throughout the year because it increases your risk of developing cancer. All traits are trade offs and to assume any trait is inherently "Bad" is to fall into the same faulty reasoning that led to eugenics in the first place.
What you are seeing is the survival of detrimental mutations or maladaptations, not natural selection against them.
Evolution is not directional. There is not De-Evolution as a counter to Evolution. There may be a future environmental condition where the current maladaptation are favorable. Evolution is the accumulation of genetic changes over time, its not the accumulation of abilities like in an RPG. Shortly after humans evolved tricolor vision we started loosing the ability to detect most pheromones. It is believed that this loss of a previously essential ability occurred because the evolutionary role for which pheromones had evolved (to signal sexual receptiveness among other things) could also be met by increased color sensitivity (consider the baboons with the red asses everyone likes to laugh at, or the ones with the blue, red and white skin on their faces), thus making the loss of one specific ability unimportant in the large flow of genetic changes.
My original subject line still holds be careful with those assumptions
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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).
We might not need to relent from any of those allegedly "bad foods". We may just need to lay off the recently invented industrial food chemicals.
I have a family member that's just fine with white wheat flour products as long as the flour in question is not brominated. This easily could have been misread as "gluten intolerance". You gotta wonder whether these "allergies" are the real thing or just chemical sensitivity.
Plus there is always moderation to consider. Just about anything is harmful in excess.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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/
actually i meant to say millennia
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...
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....
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.
Also note that there is a difference between a nutritionist and a dietician. Dieticians are accredited professionals with a master's degree, whereas a nutritionist may have had only a few classes or even be self-proclaimed. I have noticed that a lot of fad diets seem to be coming from nutritionists (though not all).
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 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 !
"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.
Very true. Registered Dietician (RD) is a protected title like MD, or PhD. No such protection exists for "Nutritionist" and as a result anyone can describe themselves as such. In animal nutrition someone calling themselves a nutritionist generally has a PhD in the field of nutrition from an accredited university (as I have), but that is because a nutritionist is hired by the feed industry and a PhD is required to do the job.
For human nutrition, because it is so open to anyone who can write a good book and can look surprisingly healthful for their book jacket photo, the requirements are much lower. Instead of formulating nutrition plans (left to the RD's) human nutritionists are generally the charismatic front (wo)men who the brand is built around, and who's job it is to spout BS on the talk show circuit and in infomercials.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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.
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.
"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.
http://rdk.deadbsd.org/electri...
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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.
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
However, to assume that natural selection cannot accomplish in 4000 years, what we've done through selective breeding in ~40 years is odd to me. In humans there isn't some intelligence applying the selection,
Yes, there is. It is humans themselves. Natural selection means some get left behind. Humans work very hard to avoid that. Premies get intensive care, diabetics get insulin, and there are any number of other juvenile (and adult) diseases that don't "cull the herd" anymore. And even before modern medical miracles, humans went out of their way to deal with childhood diseases as an intelligent process. It has been a very long time since the wolves or other predators were allowed to pick off the weakest humans in the pack.
No, humans are not less robust, at least in an evolutionary sense, because evolution is all about survival in the environment as it is at the moment.
Diabetes, cancers, gastric disorders (Celiac, e.g.), endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and any number of other increasingly common disorders would contradict that. Even the now almost ubiquitous eye glasses show a declining trend in physical abilities. The increase in IVF for women who are otherwise unable to have children naturally only tends to continue the genes that create that problem.
There are no "bad" genes.
Of course there are, and you know what I meant was not "misbehaving" or any other sentient meaning to "bad", I meant genes that were involved in genetic disorders. Whether that's a gene that results in sickle cell or juvenile diabetes or whatever, that's what I mean by a "bad gene".
All traits are trade offs and to assume any trait is inherently "Bad" is to fall into the same faulty reasoning that led to eugenics in the first place.
Not all traits are trade-offs. Tell a child with leukemia or diabetes that his "trait" is actually beneficial in some way. Tell someone who is badly nearsighted and can't see anything without glasses that his trait is beneficial in some way. Tell the child who is born with a cleft palate that you aren't going to do cosmetic surgery because his trait is actually beneficial. Let the Down Syndrome kids use their beneficial trait to make good lives on their own.
You're bending so far over backwards to be politically correct that you're making ridiculous statements.
Evolution is not directional. There is not De-Evolution as a counter to Evolution.
I really don't care what name you want to apply to it, when you remove natural selection from the process of evolution, evolution no longer works. Humans have not been subject to natural selection for most negative traits for a very long time. No, we haven't managed to remove it completely and there is still infant mortality, but we're working as hard as we can to keep natural selection, and thus evolution, from working for us. By keeping natural selection from working for us, we're being "compassionate" and "social" and all those good things, but we're also allowing the non-beneficial changes to propagate and reducing the benefit from the beneficial ones.
Shortly after humans evolved tricolor vision we started loosing the ability to detect most pheromones.
I really have to figure out how the human fossil record gives you that information. No, I really don't care, because that's so far in the past that it was before existing civilizations and thus before current efforts to defeat natural selection that it is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
I find it interesting that white rice always gets the blame laid on it, but there are literally billions of healthy people who eat white rice almost three times daily.
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.
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.
It is hard to build respect for a profession when they use the word "calorie" to signify a concept of kilocalorie. Do you also do that?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Natural selection means some get left behind. Humans work very hard to avoid that.
And you believe that none are? When did the death rate for those under 80 reach zero? I some how managed to miss the announcement! [/sarcasm]
Of course humans work to avoid that. That doesn't make them 100% successful at it. Plenty of people die before or without reproducing, and those people were "selected" against whether as a result of disease, war, bad luck, lack of desire to have children, or their own stupidity. We are not as heavily culled by "natural" events as we might be, or once were, but that only means that we've increased our genetic diversity.
Some of those genes have demonstrable down sides, but it is common in evolutionary studies to see a widening of the gene pool when selection pressure is reduced. This is a natural part of evolution as the species begins to differentiate to take advantage of different ecological niches. Furthermore, there are most definitely internal selective pressures at play as well.
Western countries have become nuclei of successful people, with hot bed (like silicon valley) acting as concentrators of certain phenotypes (the stereotypical borderline and high functioning autistics that are the engine of computing progress). That those traits may have been an evolutionary disadvantage in pre-computing days does not change their current value today, or their current effect on those individuals chances of reproducing.
Diabetes, cancers, gastric disorders (Celiac, e.g.), endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and any number of other increasingly common disorders would contradict that
1. Diabetes is no longer fatal, and many who have the more mild form could control it without insulin if they just ate a healthier diet.
2. Cancer has always existed for those who live long enough
3. gastric disorders, if not fatal or don't reduce ones chances of reproduction, are not inherently relevant to survival even without modern medicine
4. endometriosis, has also always existed. it can be seen in non-domesticated species
5. fibromyalgia is vague pain. Again, pain by itself is not fatal and does not reduce ones odds of reproducing even in the absence of modern medicine. Especially if it frequently does not occur until one is past their prime reproductive years.
6. poor eyesight has not been a selection pressure in centuries, even before the development of optics or the widespread availability of corrective lenses. Again, especially in those cases where it does not appear until after the person has passed their prime reproductive years. Most people who wear glasses at younger ages do so to correct relatively minor defects in their vision.
7. IVF has risen in prevalence in part due to changes in human culture. Many women who might have been able to conceive naturally in their teens and 20's need IVF in their 30's and 40's because of non-genetic problems, and therefore are irrelevant to the discussion of selective pressures.
Whether that's a gene that results in sickle cell or juvenile diabetes or whatever, that's what I mean by a "bad gene".
Being heterozygous for sickle cell is a BENEFIT if you live in a malaria rich region of the world, so to categorically state that it is "Bad" is myopic. This is exactly the point I've been trying to drive home. The value of a phenotype is situation dependent, and just because it confers no benefit in one situation does not mean it could not under different circumstances. The sickle cell trait spread as widely as it did in African populations in spite of the problems being homozygous for the trait can cause because the heterozygotes were better adapted to frequent exposure to malaria.
Tell a child with leukemia or diabetes that his "trait" is actually beneficial in some way. Tell someone who is badly nearsighted and can't see anything without glasses that his trait is beneficial in some way. Tell t
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
In the US we formulate animal diets based in kcal/lb (industry) or kcal/kg (academia). In Europe they are more likely to use MJ/kg.
I've never understood why the human nutrition folks have created such unnecessary confusion. I've been told the goal was to make things simpler and easier for the layperson to understand, but the success of that is dubious at best.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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).
Natural selection means some get left behind. Humans work very hard to avoid that.
And you believe that none are? When did the death rate for those under 80 reach zero?
When you can read "work very hard at" and a later comment about there still being infant mortality, and come up with thinking that I said that nobody ever dies, well, I know you're not here to discuss this honestly.
Bye.
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
You were the one claiming that we had eliminated natural selection, I was using a little thing called sarcasm to emphasize the inconsistency between the claim and the existence of mortality due to reasons other than old age. If you can't parse sarcasm when it is pointed out to you in advance then you probably shouldn't be wasting your or anyone else's time by posting.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde