Comment by araneae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by araneae | Hacker News Reader

The idea that a paleo diet will make you healthier because it's what we evolved to eat is bullshit.

Firstly, it assumes that we haven't evolved since modern agriculture, which of course we have; people with ancestors from areas with grain harvesting have more copies of the amylase gene, which produce enzymes that help us to better digest calories.

Secondly, it assumes that the "priority" of evolution in paleo times was to optimize our health in our current environment. It wasn't. Our hunter and gatherer ancestors were starving; we were optimized to extract every last calorie from our food. So when simple starches like wheat came around, we evolved to have more copies of the amylase gene - something that does not help us today.

The paleo diet works precisely for the opposite of the stated reason. These are foods that our bodies are not evolved to perfectly digest. Uncooked foods are far enough in our evolutionary past that people on raw-only diets consistently lose weight, even if they eat a lot. If they were on the savannah they would die.

I'm not saying the diet itself can't be great, just that the entire article could be fodder for Penn & Teller.

> it assumes that we haven't evolved since modern agriculture

No one is arguing that we haven't evolved at all. But humanoids have been around for millions of years, and the 10,000 years since the advent of agriculture is a very small evolutionary time step. So the reasoning is more that we haven't evolved enough to fully digest grains without damage to our gut lining.

> Our hunter and gatherer ancestors were starving

You'd be surprised that a lot of hunter gatherers (HGs) were doing a lot better than that, according to anthropologists. One number cited in Robb Wolf's book is that HGs on average only worked on procuring food 10-15 hours a week, with the rest spent socializing, resting, etc.

> people on raw-only diets consistently lose weight, even if they eat a lot

Do you have any supporting evidence for this statement? Virtually all foods on the Paleo diet can be eaten raw (meat, seafood, fruits, vegetables, nuts), and are cooked more for taste than digestibility.

"the 10,000 years since the advent of agriculture is a very small evolutionary time step"

True, although those 10,000 (I've actually heard 20-40K) years are the most recent ones in our evolution and therefore have more direct bearing on our current state. In addition, humans experienced a population bottleneck around 60,000 that brought us down to 10-20K individuals. Since then, there have been repeated agricultural famines. These stresses should have favored people able to eat the grains that formed the basis of our diet.

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