A diet that draws from the ancient past
sapiens.org
sapiens.org
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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)