Probably. It always amuses me that people automatically associate "paleo" with "eating mammoths every day", when a simple glance to other primates shows a heavily plant-based diet, on top of which, how many mammoths do they think our ancient ancestors were killing? Even well into the 20th century, meat was not an everyday food, and it's completely unnecessary (some argue harmful) to the human diet.
> Even well into the 20th century, meat was not an everyday food
Centuries always sound so long, just to make your point very clear: there are living humans who ate meat as a treat during childhood.
That's basically the approach my wife and I are taking: 95% plant-based. We have meat maybe twice a month (as a treat). Not only do we feel healthier, it's also so cheap.
Its not that I think an ancestral perspective is a bad one. Its just that:
- existing hunter-gatherers have a bewildering array of different diets, many of them high in carbs and vegetation.
- wild meat is very different from farmed meat (yes, even grass-fed beef) - it has way less saturated fat, to begin with.
- When do you stop the clock on evolution? My ancestors were almost certainly peasants. Probably so were yours. So while they weren't eating modern ultra-processed food, they were probably eating closer to a whole-foods based vegan/vegetarian diet on a daily basis, with meat on special occasions - for thousands of years.
My pet theory is that, to the extent that Paleo, Low Carb, but also Whole Foods Vegan diets work, its because they all cut out ultra-processed foods. However, to the extent that sellers of ultra-processed foods can catch up and start selling you processed keto foods etc., these diets will stop working.
Evolution works on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that our ancestors were peasants a 1000 years ago doesn't change most of our evolutionary makeup (maybe lactose tolerance).
This excerpt doesn't even get to the solutions. It's just a hook: if you enjoy reading about extreme bushcrafting, this might be the diet book for you.
More charitably, it sounds like one person's journey to solving his problems with food, written up in the belief that other people's problems are similar enough that they might benefit from what he learned. It sounds like his solutions are pretty specific to his issues, but with 9 billion people on the planet, who knows.
I think one good message that can be taken is that many people have extremely narrow ideas about normal, healthy eating, and the possible healthy solutions for them might be far outside what they think is normal. Anything they trust that gives them the courage to experiment (whether it's new-agey woo, moral purity, cultural tradition, masculine primitivism, or whatever) can help them get out of their rut and maybe find something that works for them.
I don’t know what the optimal diet is, but the status quo ain’t it. Obesity and diabetes are growing uncontrollably. Would love to see a modern well done study that provides all food (cost/compliance is the main issue with most studies) and multiple diets, the government should pay for this as it’s really an epidemic.
Unfortunately this is only an excerpt from a longer article and does not offer any answers about what the diet of the ancient past was, or what the diet of the future should be.
>what the diet of the ancient past was, or what the diet of the future should be.
I suppose it would have a lot to do with where your ancestors lived geographically. Dairy, Meat, Vegetables, Grains. The healthiest approach to consuming food is trying to keep it as simple as possible. The more we process it the unhealthier it is, although fermentation is an exception.
Fermentation, salted preservation, and spice. Each culture has an older understanding of how to use food as medicine. It is where modern medicine finds its own roots.
This article shows some of the hallmarks of modern writing that simply irk me. The article begins with a long personal anecdote that has only the most tangential of connections to the premise. You could slice away about half the article and lack nothing. Not entertainment, not information - nothing.
It also raises questions related to the author's new book, but gives very little information. It is an extended ad.
It’s perplexing to me, to be honest, considering how streamlined the whole internet has become. Social media is full of narcissistic behavior, but even niche one-off hobby websites are full of it, too.
> We humans may be essentially biologically the same—with the same nutritional needs—as we were 300,000 years ago, but we are living in the 21st century.
Off by at least an order of magnitude, possibly two - lactose tolerance developed a few thousand years ago at the latest.
Even if you could know what cavemen ate, there's little guarantee it would be "optimal" (whatever that means) or even healthy. Humans change faster than we think.
We didn't just evolve to a diet from 300,000 or 30,000 or 3,000 years ago. We accumulated adaptations suited to all of those diets -- and genetic drift that made us unsuited to anything else -- and then our diet shifted and we began adapting to new foodstuffs instead.
There's no factory default diet for us to reset to. It was always a moving target.
Of course how well an animal digests the food it is eating affects its survival and the survival of its offspring?
If your tribe of anatomically modern homo sapiens sapiens moves to the sea shore for a thousand years because environmental changes have made your previous lifestyle impossible, mutations that correlate with shelf fish allergies are going to be highly disadvantageous, for instance. If wheat farming is all the rage, anyone who can digest gluten is going to have way more offspring than anyone who can't.
These "caveman" diet fads are really weird. Lets say hunter-gatherers instead, that describes our collective deep past much better. Their respective diets are super varied and diverse, from almost exclusively meat in arctic climates to a wild mix of hundreds of species from different biomes in the Kalahari to basically pescatarian in some very maritime places.
Then there's lifestyle – nutritional needs will vary greatly according to whether one routinely walks 20km a day, lives in the cold, or stares at a screen in airconditioned offices, and it's not just about calories, sometimes it's probably even a genetic thing – there seem to have been adaptations to an almost exclusively carnivorous diet. Replicating their diet wouldn't be great for most people.
And on top of all that there's the ten-ish millennia of adaptation to agriculture and raising livestock that you mentioned. I don't think there is much to it save for some very general insights into how diets and the environment interact.
In any case, I for one (biology/psychology might differ) is infinitely better when on a restricted diet with very active day. Everything falls into place naturally. I agree with not falling for shallow fads, but there's something to basic "natural" lifestyles.
Indeed. Eat many plants, fruits, berries, and all the organs of animals (skip brains if you're afraid of CZD). Avoid wheat and cereals that much. Seems beer was a-okay though? Modern hunter gatherers do walk/jog for 7 to 9 hours a day, so...
(At 3kph with occasional sprinting. Seems to be what our gait is optimised for to avoid injuries)
Humans lived for like 1/3 the time in the ancient past. Its not clear to me that the diet of primitive people ended up with is somehow an optimal diet so much as a diet of circumstances.
Anyways any diet that doesn't let me eat eggs rolls is obviously wrong.
I guess you are talking about life expectancy being way lower back in the day. Those numbers are massively skewed by infant mortality and so many other things (infections, complications during child birth, ...) that are nowadays easily sorted out by antibiotics and other means.
There is literally no reason to believe that what people are in the areas they lived in with the technology they had was somehow better for a person than regular food today. It pretends that everyone are the same food and that the food was somehow optimal rather than just what was available.
What led to obesity is not the food per se but the wide availability of it and the change in other norms like exercise and outdoor play which changes lifelong habits. Even with a world of processed food it's rare to see a fat person who is a daily runner and that is no accident.
But this theory that humans used to eat an optimal diet and now don't assumes that humans in the past were somehow in more control of their diets than we are today and I don't think that's true at all.
36 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 84.9 ms ] threadProbably. It always amuses me that people automatically associate "paleo" with "eating mammoths every day", when a simple glance to other primates shows a heavily plant-based diet, on top of which, how many mammoths do they think our ancient ancestors were killing? Even well into the 20th century, meat was not an everyday food, and it's completely unnecessary (some argue harmful) to the human diet.
Books like "How Not to Die" opened my eyes.
Centuries always sound so long, just to make your point very clear: there are living humans who ate meat as a treat during childhood.
That's basically the approach my wife and I are taking: 95% plant-based. We have meat maybe twice a month (as a treat). Not only do we feel healthier, it's also so cheap.
Better for the environment too.
- existing hunter-gatherers have a bewildering array of different diets, many of them high in carbs and vegetation.
- wild meat is very different from farmed meat (yes, even grass-fed beef) - it has way less saturated fat, to begin with.
- When do you stop the clock on evolution? My ancestors were almost certainly peasants. Probably so were yours. So while they weren't eating modern ultra-processed food, they were probably eating closer to a whole-foods based vegan/vegetarian diet on a daily basis, with meat on special occasions - for thousands of years.
My pet theory is that, to the extent that Paleo, Low Carb, but also Whole Foods Vegan diets work, its because they all cut out ultra-processed foods. However, to the extent that sellers of ultra-processed foods can catch up and start selling you processed keto foods etc., these diets will stop working.
More charitably, it sounds like one person's journey to solving his problems with food, written up in the belief that other people's problems are similar enough that they might benefit from what he learned. It sounds like his solutions are pretty specific to his issues, but with 9 billion people on the planet, who knows.
I think one good message that can be taken is that many people have extremely narrow ideas about normal, healthy eating, and the possible healthy solutions for them might be far outside what they think is normal. Anything they trust that gives them the courage to experiment (whether it's new-agey woo, moral purity, cultural tradition, masculine primitivism, or whatever) can help them get out of their rut and maybe find something that works for them.
Edit: after googling, no doubt this is marketing for a new book: https://eatlikeahuman.com
I suppose it would have a lot to do with where your ancestors lived geographically. Dairy, Meat, Vegetables, Grains. The healthiest approach to consuming food is trying to keep it as simple as possible. The more we process it the unhealthier it is, although fermentation is an exception.
It also raises questions related to the author's new book, but gives very little information. It is an extended ad.
in print publications, at least content has to go through an editor (usually)
Off by at least an order of magnitude, possibly two - lactose tolerance developed a few thousand years ago at the latest.
Even if you could know what cavemen ate, there's little guarantee it would be "optimal" (whatever that means) or even healthy. Humans change faster than we think.
We didn't just evolve to a diet from 300,000 or 30,000 or 3,000 years ago. We accumulated adaptations suited to all of those diets -- and genetic drift that made us unsuited to anything else -- and then our diet shifted and we began adapting to new foodstuffs instead.
There's no factory default diet for us to reset to. It was always a moving target.
This would only be true if groups of people who eat certain foods reproduce less than other groups. Otherwise you're thinking of Lamarckism[0].
With modern medicine, people can eat suboptimal diets their whole lives...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
If your tribe of anatomically modern homo sapiens sapiens moves to the sea shore for a thousand years because environmental changes have made your previous lifestyle impossible, mutations that correlate with shelf fish allergies are going to be highly disadvantageous, for instance. If wheat farming is all the rage, anyone who can digest gluten is going to have way more offspring than anyone who can't.
Then there's lifestyle – nutritional needs will vary greatly according to whether one routinely walks 20km a day, lives in the cold, or stares at a screen in airconditioned offices, and it's not just about calories, sometimes it's probably even a genetic thing – there seem to have been adaptations to an almost exclusively carnivorous diet. Replicating their diet wouldn't be great for most people.
And on top of all that there's the ten-ish millennia of adaptation to agriculture and raising livestock that you mentioned. I don't think there is much to it save for some very general insights into how diets and the environment interact.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Anyways any diet that doesn't let me eat eggs rolls is obviously wrong.
Its a bunk premise.
But I broadly agree with you. Food, exercise, and luck in avoiding sickness. It was true throughout human prehistory and today as well.
But this theory that humans used to eat an optimal diet and now don't assumes that humans in the past were somehow in more control of their diets than we are today and I don't think that's true at all.