The Evolution of Diet 281
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."
Re:ha! Inuit diet. Hazda diet. (Score:3, Informative)
Inuit in modern Canada eat less walrus and drink more beer than Inuit from three centuries ago.
Citation Needed (Score:5, Informative)
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/... [slate.com]
Re:Correlation Does Not Imply Causation (Score:5, Informative)
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.
As it turns out not all calories consumed are the same: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/ar... [jamanetwork.com] Diets that produce lower insulin response give a metabolic advantage and reduce hunger. In the study the advantage of a low-glycemic diet over a low fat one, at the same calorie level, was 125 calories per day. This has matched my own experience, additionally I've seen another 75 calorie per day advantage from hunger reduction when not controlling for total calories. (free feeding) Combined that's roughly equivalent to a 1.5 mile jog for a 200lb adult, nothing to sneeze at.
Re:"Paleolithic diets" now vs then (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt so-called "Paleolithic diets" are anything like people ate during that.
Yes. The classic debunking, from someone who is actually an expert on early human diets, is here [youtube.com].
Now, before all you Paleo fanatics get worked up, yes -- this speaker overemphasizes the carnivore aspect of many so-called "Paleo" diets. And there are some other details she gets wrong, but mostly in stereotyping modern "paleo diets," not in her knowledge of actual ancient diets.
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.
Yes, and this is the critical thing from that video. Even if you dismiss all the stuff she says about overemphasizing meat, the reality is that our plant-based foods are completely different from the plants that would have been eaten before the dawn of agriculture. We've selectively bred fruits and vegetables for millennia to make them tastier to us, and more concentrated in sugars and other nutrients. (And we've likewise selectively bred our meat sources so that they are very different in composition from wild game.)
So, yeah, it's basically IMPOSSIBLE to eat "like a caveman did" with normal foods from the supermarket. The "paleo" diet might be a few steps closer to some sort of early hominid diet, but it's still significantly closer to the modern diet than it is to anything eaten hundreds of thousands of years ago.
You can buy all the "unrefined" and "natural" and "raw" crap you want, but unless you're seeking out the wild forms of ancient plants (and probably eating many times the amount of fiber even vegetarians eat today) and hunting wild game, chances are your "paleo diet" is as far from the "caveman" as the diet of a rich nobleman 200 years ago would be.
Re:There's something to it (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. May apples, mulberries, currents, chokecherries, rose hips, elderberries, cherries, apples, pears, persimmons, hawthorn apples; I just took you from spring into late fall after frost and didn't even cover all the available fruits.
I've picked and made jams, pies and such out of all of the above. (You haven't truly lived until you've had chokecherry or elderberry brandy.)
Re:There's something to it (Score:5, Informative)
> They ate meat when they could get it, which wasn't 100% of the time, and the meat they got was lean.
Um... no.
If they had an animal, they used all of it. They didn't waste any of it. They would not have turned up their nose at any part of the animal because of modern diet fads.
They would have eaten the fat and been happy to have it.
You can see how the same pragmatism manifests in older food cultures where pure fat may be eaten as a delicacy. Humans for the vast majority of history have eaten whatever they could acquire and digest. Doesn't matter if you're talking about a farmer or a hunter/gatherer.