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Comment by wvl | Hacker News Reader

If it takes a link bait title to get this message across, then I'm all for it. This diet is essentially Primal, similar to the Paleo Diet (http://www.thepaleodiet.com/ ). I've been doing it for a while now, and have nothing but good things to say about eating this way.

An introductory link: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-primal-bluep...

An index into most of the content: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-101/

FAQ, and comparisons to other diets: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-book/references/questions...

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I seriously doubt any cavemen or any human other then modern man, ever had regular access to THIS much animal protein and fat. During peak times, migratory season, sure, but not all the time.

And I don't think the diet as described, most calories from meat, cheese and eggs, is the most healthy. Perhaps healthier then any diet high in processed sugar, depending on individual physiology. I certainly agree sugar is bad for you, but I think a "mostly plants" diet, is still better for most people.

Paleolithic people practically ONLY had access to fat and protein. The only non-domesticated edible plants in most places are available for, like, three months, and aren't nearly abundant enough to live on.

Go take a walk in practically any ecosystem and find edible stuff that's not an animal. There's barely anything. Primitive man clearly ate mostly animals and fish.

I believe this is false. The traditional Bushman diet depended more on vegetables than meat, and they lived in a place where vegetation is about as far from lush as you can find.

Not sure what a traditional bushman is. Are you refering to the san bushmen who eat a lot of mongongo nuts? That is a strange exception, and those people are hunters who eat a lot of meat anyway.

There are abundant written accounts of native north americans. There were those who grew corn and squash, which means they have little in common with paleolithic humans who had no such crops. And there are those that did not grow crops and ate mostly game and fish.

Anywhere away from the equator there is virtually no gatherable plant food for most of the year. Before domesticated crops, people clearly ate mostly animals, fish, and insects.

2 Things

- I'm not sure how much it matters what we ate 20,000 years ago. For example, lactose tolerance is assumed to have developed very recently in most places. People are opportunistic omnivores and it would make sense for them to be able to adapt quickly (several generations) to new eating habits.

- Guessing what people ate is tricky. If all we have to go on is modern evidence, we have a huge level of disparity. Also, just because (for example) New Guineans were primarily hunter gatherers in modern times doesn't automatically mean they were similar in every other way to pre historic Europeans.

San = Bushman. The reason I mentioned them is that they preserved their hunter-gatherer culture till a few decades ago, and anthropologists were able to measure what they actually ate, which was mostly vegetables.

You respond to this contrary evidence by simply restating your claim. There was "virtually no" plant food, and people "clearly" lived mostly on meat. Do you have any evidence at all?

I pointed out the San are a rare exception. You were trying to make a general case from this. The other ethnographies and historical accounts show high meat consumption. I also suspect the san you are talking about are stunted and trying to get by on marginal land without much game, and so not a good sample.

It bears repeating the simple fact that most places don't have wild plant food for most of the year. Pick up the army survival manual. It's mostly about how to fish and trap in many different ecosystems, because, as it explains, there isn't much wild plant food out there most of the time.

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