Someone studies one group of people at one (modern) time and place -- a group of people who probably don't even exclusively "forage" for their food and other economic activity now as encountered -- and then they, or their readers, assume that what they found is somehow typical of everyone they assign to the category "hunter gatherer", and further assume what people at what other times and places are "correctly" assigned to that category too.
https://apps.worldagroforestry.org/downloads/Publications/PD...
You don't even need to go that far - my Italian grandma who was born in a farming village in the early 1900s, knew dozens of herbs, how you would go about finding them, and how could you use them for this or that other purpose. You can't find any of those herbs in a modern supermarket except maybe for a couple of them.
I feel like we've lost some of our food cultures at some point and we're only starting to realize what we're missing.
* meat: my family is from a village near Rome, Roman traditional cuisine is famously full of recipes that use all sorts of weird meat cuts (pork jowl, internal organs of various animals...) - you won't find most of those in an average supermarket. When it comes to meat, the problem is not just cuts, but also breeds: I live in Australia and it has been extremely hard to find chicken which is not Cornish Cross. In Sydney, you can find heirloom breeds chicken at only a handful of speciality butchers, and prices are very high.
* grains: this is a well known problem, most grain-based products are based on just a handful of varietals. I have to say that the situation is starting to improve: recently, in some upmarket stores, it has become possible again to get products based on some heirloom grains, however they are pricey (example: Pasta Monongrano made from Matt or Kamut flour)
* fish: it is a known problem that fishing boats are forced to throw away certain catch, because certain fish varieties are not "marketable"
the list could continue...
There's probably still an effect in there, but it seems more likely that it's mainly antibiotics that are killing off gut microbiota variety, with an argument to be made for a role of highly processed foods.
Of course I'm sure it's highly dependent on season and region.
https://chrisryan.substack.com/p/307-jeff-leach-microbiome-e...
Sounds like a large part of the reason for their gut diversity seem to be from not just what they eat, but how they eat it (taking in lots of dirt along with their food).
This is a generalization/simplification on my part, but yes.
Hunter gatherers at a minimum are eating different foods throughout the year as seasons change, but even within seasons as different foods become available.
Reflecting on today, I’ve had four different species of fruit, three different vegetables, and two different subspecies of Cheerio. Not to forget the different meats, nuts, and dairy.
Having a Cavendish banana, Fuji apple and hothouse tomatoes isn't "diversity" as all have basically the same nutrient content [1] which is dwindling rapidly. None of which have manganese for example, because we stripped it from our topsoil long ago.
So yes, eating a handful of legumes and some honey along with a healthy slab of wild meat (which contains everything that the meat ate) could be way more nutritionally diverse than a standard western meat + veg + grain combo. That is effectively the Hadza diet.
[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/vanishing-...
Today in the United States, food is so plentiful there is enough to provide a person with the same food every day if that's what they want.
When I graze in the backyard... I don't brush off all the dirt. If there are small bugs on a leaf, I might eat em.
More like concise critique. Where I pointed out obvious flaw in “hunter gatherers were so healthy and had such a great quality of life not like us” way of thinking.
Given everything we know, this doesn’t seem too reasonable to me. I’m sure those hunters and gatherers would have loved a reliable way to purge those parasites from their digestive system. Even better if they didn’t require removing them in the first place.
Their microbiome is more diverse, with "23.4% of microbial species detected in the Hadza infants represent[ing] novel species"[2].