[HN Gopher] Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
___________________________________________________________________
Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
Author : Tomte
Score : 58 points
Date : 2022-10-01 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (knowablemagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (knowablemagazine.org)
| jleyank wrote:
| Well, people live at least twice as long, on average, as in paleo
| times so much of the damage from that diet wasn't observed in the
| fossil record due to the lack of really old skeletons. Must have
| food surpluses to value the old and infirm...
|
| Also, the exercise of those in paleo times is staggeringly better
| than today's carnivores. Good for the heart, even though fat was
| prized as a calorie source.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Humans ate whatever they could fit into their pie-hole that
| didn't kill them.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Our Ancestors probably ate whatever they could get their hands
| on. Lots of fruit/berries included.
|
| The fact is that the average 'early farmer' skeleton is shorter
| and looks less healthy from the hunter gatherers. That can means
| that grains (the bulk of the carbs back then), while reliable and
| a necessity at the time (due to population density), are not
| necessary better.
|
| If you want to look like a caveman, meat and fruits and other
| simple veggies should be your diet.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The health problems of the early farmers are not surprising
| because they lacked the modern knowledge about nutrients, e.g.
| that cereals do not have enough lysine, legumes do not have
| enough methionine, both of them do not contain adequate
| quantities of some vitamins and minerals, and so on.
|
| So the first farmers probably had very unbalanced diets in
| comparison with their ancestors, or with the much later
| farmers.
|
| Even if during a relatively short time of maybe a few centuries
| at most, the cultivation of at least 6 different plant species
| has begun (3 cereals, 2 legumes and flax), it is likely that in
| the beginning there was no group of humans who cultivated all
| of them. It is more likely that each group has started to
| cultivate just one crop, but later they exchanged experiences
| and the crops whose cultivation was successful spread all over
| the area.
|
| It is likely that many years or even centuries were necessary
| until the early farmers developed an empirical knowledge about
| how to cook and mix multiple cultivated plants to make a
| healthy diet, including details like that the legumes must be
| soaked for some time and washed before cooking, for reducing
| the amount of phytic acid and other harmful substances, and so
| on.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Our ancestors were also lucky to see the far side of 30, so I can
| perhaps be forgiven for not taking dietary tips from cave walls.
|
| Or from the modern equivalent thereof.
| greatpostman wrote:
| The only reason carbs are so prevalent now is because they're
| cheap. Grass fed meat is healthy, fat is healthy, sugar is bad,
| etc. don't believe the research, spend a few weeks eating only
| quality meat and veggies, nuts, fatty foods. See how you feel
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Our ancestors didn't have television, the internet, desk jobs,
| etc. While we can debate the finer points of Paleo, or similar,
| there's no reason to debate the standard modern Western diet. It
| sucks. Full stop. It - and its associated lifestyle - is
| generally unhealthy.
| stevebmark wrote:
| I've been into nutrition for a few years now, with my entry point
| originally being paleo. I have no medical training. Paleo has
| been shown to be off base, but eating a low carb diet and
| limiting gluten is a fine diet. Some of the nonsense in nutrition
| includes:
|
| - Carnivore, the dumbest diet ever created
|
| - Anti seed-oil people
|
| - Anti-soy people
|
| - People who say ketosis can cure anything (and I'm in ketosis)
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Aggressive statements work better with sources, evidence or at
| the very least anecdotes. Otherwise, your comment is just as
| nonsensical as the state of nutritional science.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Those statements are in line with nutrition science so it's
| unclear what sources you expect if you dismiss nutrition
| science.
| nscalf wrote:
| Like most things, these diets are usually adopted because they
| make you feel good, on accident. Carnivore is great if you have
| allergies to food you're unaware of. Keto generally works by
| making you eat less food. Paleo helps you cut out garbage. All
| of these things are good for some people, none of them are good
| for the narrative they sell.
| j7ake wrote:
| Our ancestors definitely didn't eat three meals a day punctually.
| They probably went for days with no food, then feasted after a
| big kill.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I think they probably abbreviated Herman Pontzer's first sentence
| too much and the title is kind of misleading, in the book Burn,
| it is quite clear that Pontzer believes Paleo as practiced by
| most people today is a misreading of all the historical evidence.
| There are footnotes for every proposition in the book if one is
| interested in following up to the original studies.
|
| "People have developed many different versions, but the original
| Paleo diet is quite meat-heavy." Then later in the interview he
| says the evidence supports a more varied diet in archaelogical
| record and the Hazda as if he contradicts himself.
|
| The interview uses the phrase Paleo diet for the modern form and
| the historical interchangeably so they should have done more to
| make that clear when they are referring to the former and the
| latter.
|
| In the book he talks about how even the meat heavy diet of Aleuts
| and Maasai include as much vegetable matter as they can get, they
| do not avoid carbohydrates.
|
| I would highly recommend the book as it is relatively short until
| one follows the links to read the studies.
|
| This diet discussion is only a chapter I think, the book is more
| about the double labeled water studies and conclusions.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| There's actual data on ancestral diets from preserved human
| bodies discovered in places like glaciers and anaerobic peat
| bogs. For example, here's a paper on two Iron-Age bog bodies:
|
| "An archaeological interpretation of Irish Iron Age bog bodies
| (2013)" by EP Kelly
|
| > "Scientific analysis of the chemical constituents of the hair
| and fingernails provided information on the diets of the two men
| in the months preceding their deaths. Clonycavan Man had a plant-
| based diet for four months prior to his death, suggesting that he
| may have died during the autumn before the onset of a meat-rich
| winter diet. By contrast, Oldcroghan Man may have died in the
| winter or early spring, as he ate a diet with a substantial meat
| component during the four months prior to his death."
|
| Diets likely varied globally based on local conditions - seasonal
| variation was likely the dominant factor in food sources for
| people living in the mid-latitudes and polar areas
| (winter/summer) as well as in the tropics (wet/dry), and people
| near oceans would likely be eating ocean-sourced food.
|
| This was likely true for both nomadic hunter-gatherer groups as
| well as simple subsistence farmers and herders.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I always assumed that Paleo didn't mean "no carbs", it meant
| "modeled after pre-agricultural diets", but that mainly the term
| Paleo was marketing anyway. I think Paleo adherents might say
| that it doesn't much matter what paleolithic man ate, what
| matters is what's healthy for modern man, which (they believe) is
| what their diet represents. So this kind of anthropological
| counterargument won't convince anyone, though it may make some
| people feel a smug sense of satisfaction.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| They also had a median life expectancy of about 35 years, so I
| really struggle with the "paleo" concept for macronutrients.
| dahart wrote:
| Life expectancy is primarily a statistic that reflects child &
| early mortality, it's the wrong metric to understand how long
| healthy people live. Life expectancy of all 20 year olds
| (people who didn't die before that) has been more like 50 years
| old for thousands of years. Maximum life span, or longevity,
| has been around 70-80 years for as far back as we can figure.
| Hastily googled but decent explanation:
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
|
| I don't understand what you're implying about life expectancy
| and macronutrients, can you elaborate? How does life expectancy
| (or longevity) affect macros?
| TomMasz wrote:
| They over-stress the hunter and under-stress the gatherer. Yes,
| meat is calorie-dense and without preservation doesn't last long,
| likely leading to gorging when it was available. But hunting
| takes energy and isn't always successful. Depending on meat as a
| sole (or dominant) food source wasn't a winning strategy. People
| had to eat fruit and vegetables when available or we wouldn't be
| here.
| dmarlow wrote:
| Some meat is also not very rich in fat, which is extremely
| important. A diet won't survive long on rabbits alone, for
| example.
| kcplate wrote:
| I think due to confirmation bias people seem to gravitate to
| the extremes--the mostly hunter vs mostly gatherer dietary
| arguments. People seem to miss that our bodies adapted to
| being able to basically use two forms of energy...glucose or
| fats and our bodies will try to adapt to run on whichever
| fuel is most abundant in our environment. It's one of the
| reason why our species managed settle in and survive in both
| the arctic and the kalahari
| oifjsidjf wrote:
| Assuming there are no high-fat seeds or nuts in large amount
| available then hunting has a extemely higher gain-to-
| expenditure energy ratio than gathering plants, especially if
| you hunt sheep or larger sized animals.
| nscalf wrote:
| Paleo != keto. Everyone in the paleo world loses their mind for
| sweet potatoes, it seems like it's a core staple of the diet.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet. It had carbs.
|
| Yeah, it had carbs. Just not nearly as many as this
| anthropologist wants to believe. Studying modern "hunter
| gatherer" populations is not a particularly scientific way to
| judge what it was that our human ancestors and their related
| species were actually eating several thousands or millions of
| years ago. Doing so might instigate some interesting questions,
| but there's clear and obvious limitations to studying a _scant
| few_ tribes that can be considered hunter-gatherer in an era
| where it 's nearly impossible not to have some form of contact
| with the "civilized" world.
|
| > I would say the same is true of the predominant Paleo diets
| today -- most are very meat-heavy and low-carb, downplaying
| things like starchy vegetables and fruits that would only have
| been seasonally available before agriculture.
|
| That is if they even would have been available _at all_. Fruits
| and starchy vegetables in their current form are almost
| unrecognizable to their evolutionary counterparts millions,
| thousands, or even _hundreds_ of years ago in many cases. The
| starchy tubers that early modern humans sometimes ate were
| fibrous, not particularly starchy in contrast to agricultured
| sources of starch like pretty much any variety of potato. Fruits
| are no different. The vast, vast majority of fruits before
| agriculture were not abundant in fruit flesh; they had enough
| flesh such that it encouraged animals to consume and poop out the
| seeds (if that was the strategy of the particular plant). Plants
| did not have the same pressure they do now to produce highly
| fleshy fruit at a _genetic_ level as they do now because the
| energy and substrate were not there.
|
| > But our ancestors' diets were really variable.
|
| Depends on which ancestors and when. When you look at the 4
| million years prior to the last 30k years, our diet was not
| particularly variable. This has been confirmed by stable carbon
| and nitrogen isotope testing of bone collagen found in human
| remains. Not dental calculus or tools or other things that are
| speculative. Humans ate mostly meat to the point where it was
| nearly exclusive.
|
| > We evolved as hunter-gatherers, so you're hunting and gathering
| whatever foods are around in your local environment.
|
| We are hunter- _scavengers_ , for the most part. Under most
| circumstances, the natural environment, in terms of plants, does
| not have enough available net energy to be a comparable strategy
| to hunting or raising animals that do. Unless you're fortunate
| enough to be around something like an acorn tree at the right
| time of year, your choice is to kill and immediately eat the
| flesh of an animal or to eat leaves and fibrous roots of plants
| of which there is comparatively very little nutrition or
| available energy. Harvesting, processing, and _passing_ mostly
| indigestible plant material is not nearly as efficient or
| nutritious as killing and eating animals. Gathering was and still
| is a distantly second strategy that opportunistic humans use to
| extend their chances of survivability.
|
| > Humans are strategic about what foods they go after, but they
| can target only the foods that are there. So there was a lot of
| variation in what hunter-gathers ate depending on location and
| time of year.
|
| Depends on what "a lot" means. Plants fruit, animals migrate.
| Doesn't mean that the majority of environments early humans were
| living in were cornucopias of food worth eating.
|
| > The other thing is that, partly due to that variability, but
| also partly due just to people's preferences, there's a lot of
| carbohydrate in most hunter-gatherer diets.
|
| Depends on what you mean by carbohydrate. Assuming you're not
| lumping indigestible fiber into this, the premodern earth was not
| full of starch and sugar.
|
| > Honey was probably important throughout history and prehistory.
|
| Sure, when it was available and when you were willing to get
| stung. There was never enough honey at any point in prehistory to
| be a meaningful source of energy that humans were optimized to
| rely on. It was a supplemental and tasty form of supplemental
| energy if it could be obtained.
|
| > A lot of these small-scale societies are also eating root
| vegetables like tubers, and those are very starch- and carb-
| heavy.
|
| No, they were _not_ particularly starch heavy at all, all things
| being relative. Heavy compared to what? Compared to the root
| vegetables available to us today, not even close.
|
| > So the idea that ancient diets would be low-carbohydrate just
| doesn't fit with any of the available evidence.
|
| Complete nonsense. Humans ate carbohydrates, but available and
| _digestible_ carbohydrates were mostly not available in abundance
| until humans figured out how to manipulate their own environment.
| On a scale of pure energy investment, gathering loses almost
| every time to modestly skilled hunting based on human nutritional
| needs.
|
| > I think there are a couple of reasons for that. You have a kind
| of romanticizing of what hunting and gathering was like.
|
| That's really what you're doing here. Using anecdoes about
| specific _modern_ tribes eating honey is a form of romanticizing
| paleolithic and pre-paleolithic human existence, which for the
| most part was harsh and brutal.
|
| > There is a sort of macho caveman view of the past that
| permeates a lot of what I read when I look at Paleo diet
| websites.
|
| Maybe that's because later stone age humans _were_ more macho
| than we are both in terms of testosterone level and overall
| phenotype. The longer that early human species adapted to eating
| meat and away from primarily fruit-eating, the more
| "masculinized" their phenotype. A reverse effect has been
| proposed for why modern humans of the last 30,000 years are
| somewhat less masculine-appearing than their recent hunter-
| gatherer predecessors.
|
| One doesn't even need to be aware of the fossil record at all.
| Take any two twins, feed one only meat feed the other one mostly
| carbohydrates and guess which one will have higher androgen
| levels.
|
| > There are also inherent biases in a lot of the available
| archaeological and ethnographic data. In the early 1900s, and
| even before, a lot of the ethnographic reports were written by
| men who focused on men's work.
|
| _Anything that men do is sexist. We got it._
|
| > We know that traditionally that's going to focus more on
| hunting than on gathering because of the way a lot of these
| small-scale societies divide their work: Men hunt and women
| gather.
|
| Yes. Male and female humans have differing phenotypes and
| tradeoffs that encourage them to organize themselves into
| different specialties. It really doesn't make sense in most cases
| for females, who only have so many eggs available at limited
| times to have a limited number of offspring, to go hunting or
| fight other tribes. Females who are pregnant and literally _can
| 't_ hunt can still gather and process food among other things. It
| doesn't necessarily have anything to do with tradition.
|
| > On top of that, the available ethnographic data is heavily
| skewed toward very northern cultures, such as Arctic cultures --
| since the warm-weather cultures were the first ones to get pushed
| out by farmers -- and they do tend to eat more meat.
|
| There historically have been more large ruminant animals in the
| northern hemisphere. Southern environments have less land mass
| and
|
| > But our ancestors' diets were variable.
|
| Yes, humans are opportunists.
|
| > Populations that lived near the ocean and moving rivers ate a
| lot of fish and seafood.
|
| In other words, when meat is available, it's the obvious choice
| and has a positive correlation with survival, far more so than if
| all that's around are plants with inferior nutritional value.
|
| > There is also a bias toward hunting in the archaeological
| record. Stone tools and cut-marked bones -- evidence of hunting
| -- preserve very well. Wooden sticks and plant remains don't.
|
| Because stone tools surely would have _no use at all_ for
| processing, cutting open, and eating plants? _Surely early humans
| would have never used sharp and pointy rocks to process acorns,
| break open coconuts, dig up and cut out roots, and so forth. No
| way they did any such thing. They just took bites right out of
| plants and used wooden sticks for everything._
|
| You're ignoring the stable isotope data that doesn't match your
| conception that prehistoric humans ate "a lot" of carbs.
|
| > Your research has focused a lot on a group called the Hadza.
|
| Exactly. One tribe.
|
| > People have been working with the Hadza for decades now, so we
| have these long-term records, papers published from 30 or 40
| years ago up through to today.
|
| That hardly sounds like anything near a form of a controlled
| study of a genuine hunter gatherer society that supposedly
| reflects hunter gatherers _in general_ thousands and millions of
| years ago. Like I said, such study can lead to a lot of
| interesting questions, but the answers are where the anthropology
| mostly ends and science begins.
|
| > [A] lot of the work there kind of sparked this -- is how
| important honey is. It can make up as much as a fifth of the
| group's calories, on average. Honey is just sugar and water --
| pretty high-carb and definitely not part of most modern "Paleo"
| diets.
|
| I'm sure that's a situation that would have applied to the vast
| majority of premodern human groups at any particular time. You
| don't even mention what species of bees are producing this honey.
| Were there bees around in the paleolithic era that were capable
| of producing the copious amounts of honey that modern western
| honey bees do?
|
| > The birds have adapted to a world in which humans get a lot of
| honey. I think that's really telling.
|
| That's not telling of anything other than that a couple of
| intelligent species have learned to work to each other's shared
| advantage in this one particular circumstance.
|
| > Recently, there's been some really cool work looking at the
| little bit of plaque and calculus stuck to the teeth in
| fossilized hominids. If you look at that, you'll find remains of
| plants and starches.
|
| Sure, if you ignore all the other research on dental calculus
| that shows populations of humans ate exclusively meat. Even the
| groups of humans that were found with plant material in their
| calculus still usually weren't subsisting primarily on plants or
| "a lot of starch."
|
| > There's even some evidence of a primitive flourlike substance
| that's made out of grains.
|
| That doesn't mean it's optimal or reflective of what our human
| ancestors primarily developed to survive on for over 4 million
| years. Eating grains can have a survival benefit, but some
| evidence that some early humans ate _some_ amount of grain doesn
| 't necessarily confirm that this is a reason to introduce starch
| into one's diet as a modern human.
|
| > That kind of thing is anathema to most Paleo diets, which say
| that you can't eat grains because grains are a farmed food.
|
| Maybe that's because paleolithic humans weren't eating shittons
| of grains and because grains have properties that are deleterious
| to the human body. I'm sure there were some paleolithic humans
| that ate clay when food was scarce. Does that mean we should be
| eating clay?
|
| > And you can look at the human body and see how we've adapted
| relative to our ape relatives -- what's changed in us in terms of
| how we digest food.
|
| Yes, you can, and I'm sure you'll interpret such information
| correctly.
|
| > You can look at things like gut anatomy and tooth shape.
|
| Yes, you can. Our gut anatomy, in several ways, reflects that of
| hypercarnivores. In some ways, it reflects carnivory more than
| animals like cats, which eat exclusively meat; our stomachs
| highly acidic and our cecum is next to nonexistent, hence we are
| far better suited to digest meat than to process cellulose.
|
| Our tooth shape really doesn't mean what you think it means. The
| advantage of pointy teeth in most animals is that they are
| effective for hunting their prey. I don't recall ever hearing
| about humans chasing and killing animals with their teeth. Humans
| also don't seem to have a problem eating meat with their teeth.
|
| > And if you look at that, again, the signal is kind of
| omnivorous. It isn't particularly meat-heavy.
|
| Total unadulterated nonsense. The only way you can come to this
| conclusion is if you deny the mountains of evidence that dwarf
| your view that early humans were eating a bunch of starch.
|
| Just because humans _can_ eat plants doesn 't mean they're
| optimal. Most species, including rats, develop to specialize
| towards a particular food substrate. Giving either humans or rats
| a bunch of carbs is demonstrably not health promoting for either
| species, despite rats being even more opportunistic than humans,
| despite their penchant for eating garbage.
|
| > I think this adds to the evidence that humans can be healthy on
| a wide range of diets.
|
| They can be, yes. That doesn't mean someone is wrong for eating a
| "Paleo" diet, which you seem to have a motivation to deboonk.
| Some diets are more optimal than others.
|
| > I hope it helps tamp down some of the yelling on both sides
| about how you have to have a plant-based diet or you have to have
| a meat-based diet, or you have to have another kind of diet.
|
| No one "has" to eat anything they don't want to. What people want
| to do is eat a diet that they believe is most optimal for them.
|
| > Humans evolved to be adaptable.
|
| And other animals haven't? Plenty of animals are "adaptable",
| whatever that means. Cows will eat meat if you put it in front of
| them. That doesn't mean it's optimal for their health in either
| the short or long term. Does the fact that most other animals can
| consume a variety of things and survive suggest they are
| "adaptable"?
|
| We might be more adaptable in the sense that we believe ourselves
| to have the most advanced minds on the planet, thus we ca make
| analytical decisions that other animals either can't or take
| extremely long amounts of time to do. This effectively explains
| the invention of agriculture and livestock. That much better
| represents our adaptability than whether we can consume
| carbohydrates.
|
| > And people who are vegan, and eat no meat at all, can do really
| well, too.
|
| They can, but often don't.
|
| Vegan diets have some advantages over a standard modern diet,
| namely that it doesn't activate the Randle Cycle if their
| consumption of fats is scant. This is one reason why people who
| switch to a vegan diet can feel better; their blood sugar is
| better regulated despite primarily eating carbohydrate.
|
| A potential disadvantage of vegan diets is that, despite the
| insistence of its most adamant adherents, it is nutritionally
| inferior to a diet that includes meat, thus more effort needs to
| be made to get enough essential nutrients, and this is often not
| done correctly. Same applies to protein specifically.
|
| But that's really getting beside the issue. The point is it's
| theoretically possible to remain at stable health on most diets,
| but it doesn't follow that humans are better off eating a variety
| of foods when a few particular foods have clear advantages in
| terms of nutrition and historical availability.
|
| > I think the one thing that they never have in a hunter-gatherer
| diet is the heavily processed foods that we are surrounded with.
|
| In principle, I agree, though the "processed foods are bad" thing
| is a bit of a meme at this point. Take pretty much any non-
| standard diet and you'll probably find it involves fewer
| processed foods.
|
| > You take out a lot of things like fiber
|
| You don't need fiber, actually, at least when you're eating
| primarily meat.
|
| > Processed foods seem to be a big driver of obesity.
|
| Yes, though not so much that they lack fiber and more that they
| contain poisons and activate the Randle Cycle.
| oifjsidjf wrote:
| The "starch heavy tubers" didn't exist in ancient times, they
| were mostly high fiber low starch-like food, totaly different
| than modern tubers like a potato.
|
| Also: using carbon/nitrogen dating to detect what we ate goes
| back max 100k years, so we don't know what we ate before that
| based on the bones.
|
| Honey was pretty much the only ancient high-carb food.
|
| All modern high-starchy plants (rice, potatoes,...) are a modern
| "invention".
|
| Ancient fruit also had hardly any sugar and other than berries it
| didn't exist in any remotely similar form that we know today.
|
| Also using just one group that exists today (Hadza) is
| ridicoulous to generalize this to 100k+ years ago.
|
| These people usually say "see, we eat high carb because of dental
| residue from starches" but they forget that those starches at
| that time were extremely low carb.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > The "starch heavy tubers" didn't exist in ancient times
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| "In Central America, domesticated sweet potatoes were present
| at least 5,000 years ago"
|
| "Sweet potato has been radiocarbon-dated in the Cook Islands to
| 1210-1400 CE"
| adrian_b wrote:
| I assume that the poster above has meant by "ancient times" a
| time before Neolithic, i.e. more than 10 thousand years ago.
|
| Obviously, there are wild plants with starchy tubers or
| roots, so they must have existed before the Neolithic.
| However, like also the wild fruits, the starchy tubers or
| roots of wild plants are usually much smaller than those of
| cultivated plants like potatoes or sweet potatoes.
|
| Therefore gathering enough starchy tubers or roots to feed a
| human would have been hard work. Nevertheless, that is still
| a method that is more likely to be able to provide enough
| food for a human, than gathering wild fruits.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Even before cultivation, there were many fruits with high
| content of sugar, as can be seen today in various wild fruits.
|
| However, where you are right is that those wild fruits were
| much smaller than the present-day cultivated fruits, and their
| energy density was low anyway, due to the high water content,
| so gathering a quantity large enough to provide a significant
| fraction of the daily intake of energy for an animal of the
| size of a human would have required too much time to be a
| frequent occurrence.
|
| It is certain that humans have always enjoyed eating sweet wild
| fruits whenever they could find them, but they have never been
| able to survive without eating other food in much larger
| quantities.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Fruit in nature is highly variable. I can't find a link to a
| paper that was published that showed that aboriginal fruit was
| on average a bit higher in sugar content than standard
| varieties. Here's a paper that came up in a quick search, and
| the main point is really that the sugar content is highly
| variable in nature, and some natural fruit are rich in sugar
| [1]
|
| Modern breeding does not have high sugar content as it's
| biggest priority but often instead focuses first on the ability
| to grow the plant in an agricultural system, sell it in a
| supermarket (durable in transport, avoid spoiling), and eat it
| conveniently (for example remove seeds). This includes reducing
| toxins and bitter flavors so that fruit can be picked before it
| is fully ripe.
|
| [1]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S025462991...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I've read similar missives like this before, and I've always felt
| that they are at least somewhat of a strawman. The primary
| feature I always have associated with paleo is no _processed_
| carbs. That is, no flour or sugar. But certainly things like
| fruit and root vegetables are always fine, and encouraged.
|
| Yes, some paleo adherents make it very meat heavy, and others
| combine paleo with low carb generally. But when I see articles
| like this saying "All paleo people think about is meat, meat,
| meat", I feel like they're arguing against some very limited,
| specific version of paleo that is not the norm.
|
| I do feel they make a good point about honey, though.
| [deleted]
| petesergeant wrote:
| Last I checked, paleo was seriously anti normal potatoes, and
| very pro sweet-potatoes/yams, with some pseudo-science about
| the difference being one is a descendant of the nightshade.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Honey throws a huge wrench in the paleo argument: it's
| essentially a 100% processed/refined sugar of which the Hadza
| in particular consume huge amounts with no ill effect.
|
| Matter of fact seems to be that if you can use the calories,
| there is nothing wrong with getting them separate from
| nutrients. A highly active person might need twice as many
| calories as his sedentary twin but only 20-30% more nutrients
| to sustain himself, and the difference can pretty much come
| from anywhere.
|
| You can see the same phenomenon in elite athletes: Andre Agassi
| for instance ran almost exclusively on candy and McDonalds for
| most of his career.
|
| How relevant is this for most of us? Very little. We'll do
| better eating more "primitive" foods and less processed ones
| etc etc.
| vixen99 wrote:
| As you concede we shouldn't take away too many lessons from
| the Hadza unless we too hunt for our food with hand-made bows
| and arrows and forage for edible plants. Takes lots of
| calories to do that, calories which don't lie around waiting
| to be turned into fat. A point you make about other very
| active people. No ill effect due to diet? Not sure about that
| given their life span though of course causes of death may be
| entirely unrelated to diet especially with their tough life
| style. We should also remember our very varied genetic
| inheritance as illustrated in stories of the 'my grandfather
| smoked like a chimney and died at 93' genre. True in my case
| but it's a risky bet to assume you've got the same genes.
|
| https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hadza
| e44858 wrote:
| They ate honeycomb, which is very different from the refined
| honey you'd find in a grocery store. Comb has large amounts
| of protein from pollen and bee larvae.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Honey and table sugar are _not_ the same. In honey the
| fructose and glucose are side by side but not chemically
| joined (monosaccharides) in sucrose they are joined together
| (disaccharide) these require different gut bacteria to break
| down and can plausibly have different biological effects when
| consumed.
| jdhn wrote:
| I take it that having the fructose and glucose side by side
| is OK, but with sucrose being joined together that's bad?
| whiddershins wrote:
| For some people. In theory.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But honey and HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) ARE the same,
| for all practical purposes nutritionally. Honey is
| basically concentrated Coca-Cola.
|
| And HFCS is popularly demonized even more than sugar is...
| so I'm not sure what your point is.
| mementomorti wrote:
| What about other stuff in honey, such as microbiome
| content?
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Genuinely confused here: honey has antimicrobial
| properties. What micro biome content??
| peter303 wrote:
| People have been processing foods since the beginning. (1)
| Changing texture by removing rough parts, beating into mushes.
| (2) Heat processing, boiling, roasting, frying, soups. (3)
| Dehydrating, drying (4) Fermenting.
|
| Modern industrial food processing uses machines and mass
| production. Adds chemicals like sugar, starch, salt, spice,
| nitrates, phosphates ... Probably too much of this.
| dahart wrote:
| > I feel like they're arguing against some very limited,
| specific version of paleo that is not the norm.
|
| What is the "norm" for paleo? Genuinely curious. I guess
| there's a distribution that ranges from instagram/gym culture
| to product advertisement to serious scientific anthropology.
| The problem, I _think_ , is that there are many, many more
| people sharing the instagram/gym talking points than there are
| anthropologists. So if the norm is defined by number of people
| advocating the benefits of a paleo diet, I'd argue the "meat,
| meat, meat" view is far and away more common than the idea that
| the actual diet of ancient humans includes corn, potatoes, and
| honey. The meat view is certainly what I've heard the most of
| when the word "paleo" is being used. BTW heard a podcast
| recently that touched on how the paleo advertising for dog
| food, arguing that dogs' ancestors are wild wolves and only ate
| meat, was making dogs sick because modern domesticated dogs are
| evolved for a heavy carb diet.
| lkrubner wrote:
| Unless you've recently watched one of your own children starve to
| death and die then you are not on the Paleo diet. Before the
| Industrial Revolution (and linked Agricultural Revolution) humans
| spent roughly 10% of their lives facing famine conditions. This
| would typically be concentrated into a few famine years, or
| perhaps a recurring dry season, depending on where you lived. But
| that averages out to going 3 days a month without any food. So
| unless you do a complete 3 day fast each month, then you are not
| on the Paleo diet.
|
| It is known there are many health benefits to fasting. Why is
| that? It is likely that, after tens of millions of years of
| surviving episodes of famine, our bodies simply leave certain
| vital tasks to moments of famine, and therefore if you don't
| inflict famine on yourself, your body is going without an
| important reset which used to imposed on us by outside
| circumstances.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Around the time some bees moved into my house I did a lot of
| reading about them and was amazed that they are so prevalent in
| the tropics and particular Africa.
|
| We lived with them for a few years and eventually they moved out
| and a beekeeper we consulted with set up some hives in our wet
| meadow which produce some of the best tasting honey I've ever
| had.
| samatman wrote:
| I agree with the headline (and so would the "Paleo diet" people,
| in quotes because that's marketing, not a historical claim), but
| the Hadza aren't my ancestors, or particularly closely related to
| them. That's true of non sub-Saharan people generally.
|
| More importantly, no contemporary hunter-gatherers are a good
| model for pre-agricultural people (to call them hunter-gatherers
| at that time is to imply there were other sorts of people, which
| there were not). The remaining people practicing such a folkway
| live on marginal land, the harsh truth of human existence being
| that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for
| pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out.
|
| Evidence for eating anything we could get our hands on, including
| quite a bit of meat, is abundant in paleoarchaeology.
|
| What no one ate as much of is grains, specifically ground grains.
| We know this because, while grinding stones date back hundreds of
| thousands of years, the tooth wear patterns which indicate a diet
| primarily based on flour are not evident in remains until
| agriculture.
|
| My point being that the Hadza speciality in honey-scavenging is
| much like the Inuit speciality in seals: it's an adaptation to
| circumstances which suits them, but probably doesn't teach us
| much about how we can eat healthy, or much about how our pre-
| agricultural ancestors tended to eat.
| hinkley wrote:
| > that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for
| pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out.
|
| Have you read _Guns, Germs and Steel_? Agriculture and
| Colonialism went together, club and hand, not fork and hand.
| Agriculture didn't win so much as it conquered the world at
| spear point.
|
| I've even read a few feminist things recently that tie sexism
| to agriculture, one even claims that the plow is the worst
| thing to happen to women. That gives a much darker sentiment to
| "beating swords into plowshares".
| User23 wrote:
| Guns, Germs, and Steel is thoroughly discredited pop science.
| And even then you're misrepresenting its claims.
|
| Look to David Reich and his students for actual evidence
| based science on human migrations.
|
| And of course there are virtually no impartial contemporary
| works on the Age of Exploration, because the politics of our
| day require vilifying those civilizations.
|
| The objective reality is that the colonial period was just
| one of many human migrations. It wasn't the worst, it wasn't
| the first, it's not the last, and there will be more,
| including the largest mass migrations in human history
| occurring right now.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Europe had a considerable population predating the Age of
| Exploration, while I won't commit to calling it causal,
| enclosure is attributed as one of the reasons for the AoE
| in texts. And enclosure was at least in part driven by
| agriculture. So you can call it what you may, but I would
| call socioeconomically driven violent ingress into
| previously occupied territories colonialism and not
| migration.
|
| Reich's book was good.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14395-4
| hinkley wrote:
| How about 1491? He straight up claims the arrival of manioc
| in Africa contributed to a population boom that presaged
| the slave trade.
|
| Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so
| much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples. It
| takes far longer to adapt to native food sources than to
| bring in annual crops that not only take but a few years to
| establish, but also require removing the forests and
| prairies of the defeated culture to do it. There is nothing
| for you here anymore. Assimilate to your new masters.
|
| Also if anyone has refuted that patterns of conquest around
| the world have been highly amplified in east-west bands
| because of the biomes those territories represent, I'd love
| to hear it.
| throwaway8582 wrote:
| > Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so
| much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples.
|
| Nomadic people are quite capable of conquering land, the
| most obvious example being Genghis Khan, who managed to
| build the Mongol empire into the largest in human
| history.
|
| It is true there is a general trend in history of
| agricultural societies displacing hunter/gather
| societies, but that's simply because agriculture
| generates more calories per square kilometer than a
| hunter/gatherer lifestyle. As populations grow beyond the
| carrying capacity of the natural environment,
| hunter/gatherers either forced to adopt agriculture or
| get conquered by the larger armies of those people that
| have.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich
| enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those
| lifestyles would have won out.
|
| I don't buy this explanation at all. You could say the exact
| opposite: their land provides so well that they don't need to.
| I'm find with not knowing which, that's up to scientists who
| actually study that; not something that can be deduced _a
| priori_.
| jbotz wrote:
| I think you're missing the point... agriculture allows for
| greater population density and specialization, which makes
| armies possible (not to mention technology leading to
| superior armaments), which in turn means that when the two
| enter into conflict, the militarized agricultural society
| wins. It's not a value judgement about which lifestyle is
| better, but if hunter-gatherers live on land that's good for
| agriculture, then eventually an agricultural society will
| want that land, and the rest is history. This old story is
| still playing out today, with the very few hunter-gatherers
| remaining being wiped out as we speak.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think you're missing the point... the only reason you'd
| need any of that is if it were useful to you. If your
| environment provides everything you need, then it isn't.
| Everything you describe needs to be driven by needs. If
| those needs don't exist because all wants are satisfied in
| such a society, then there's no push or pull to do all of
| that. I think you're basing your comment on the assumption
| that they're missing out on something, but this is exactly
| what I'm challenging. If you wanted to convince me, you'd
| have to establish without a doubt that they do have the
| shit land and that they live in poverty and don't get what
| they need and are completely marginalized; however, that's
| far from what I've seen in documentations about them
| (ignoring notable exceptions.)
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| "What no one ate as much of is grains, specifically ground
| grains."
|
| From the article...
|
| "Recently, there's been some really cool work looking at the
| little bit of plaque and calculus stuck to the teeth in
| fossilized hominids. If you look at that, you'll find remains
| of plants and starches. So we actually do have preserved
| evidence that early humans are eating lots of starchy vegetable
| foods. There's even some evidence of a primitive flourlike
| substance that's made out of grains. That kind of thing is
| anathema to most Paleo diets, which say that you can't eat
| grains because grains are a farmed food."
|
| Can't have evidence mucking up your belief system eh?
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| Root vegetables are not grains.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _The remaining people practicing such a folkway live on
| marginal land, the harsh truth of human existence being that if
| it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism,
| those lifestyles would have won out._
|
| That's a bit too harsh, and I spent a couple weeks living with
| the Hadza at one point. Even went honey-gathering with them up
| into a Baobab tree, although I was too scared to stick my hand
| in. They live in the African savannah, which is where humankind
| first evolved. Olduvai Gorge, where some of the oldest hominid
| fossils have been found, is basically next door to the Hadza.
| So while yes, Intuits are adapted to "extreme" conditions, the
| Hadza are living in the most "native human" conditions
| possible. It is anything but marginal, as there has been no
| evidence or history of famine ever in the Hadza people.
|
| It is true that the area is ill-suited for agriculture, which
| is why the Hadza have remained, but agriculture is a very
| recent invention in evolutionary terms. That doesn't make the
| savannah "marginal". Also, the idea that you're not
| particularly closely related to the Hadza is obviously false,
| since we all share an ancestry with the original sub-Saharan
| hominids. If you're of European descent, for example, you share
| more with the Hadza than you do with those of East Asian
| descent -- as they also share more with the Hadza than they
| would with you.
|
| You're correct in that this might not have much applicability
| to a modern diet, but it is valuable in puncturing myths such
| as the idea that "paleo" people never ate anything high in
| sugar. I do personally wonder if things like honey were common
| worldwide, though, whether it's berries or saps or syrups or
| similar.
| lettergram wrote:
| In the northern hemisphere, only meat could sustain humans
| through winter. The cold also kept the meat better longer.
|
| I have to imagine that over a few hundred thousand years the
| savannah changed as well as the world as a whole. We are
| probably adapted based on our genetics rather substantially
| to particular diets.
|
| I can imagine gathering berries and honey would be more
| common in temperate or tropical climates. But in the colder
| climates milk, cheese, eggs and meat had to be a larger
| percentage of the diet.
| fjabre wrote:
| "They live in the African savannah, which is where humankind
| first evolved"
|
| We have some evidence to suggest that early humans were there
| but it is a huge assumption and leap of faith to make a
| statement like this with certainty. This statement is more
| likely a religious statement than one a good scientist would
| make.
|
| A good scientist would not make such a bold assumption
| without putting it in quotes or a star next to it. You cannot
| make this statement definitively.
| hactually wrote:
| As far as I was aware, this is established fact. Do you
| have any counter arguments that myself and the OP may have
| missed?
| hackerlight wrote:
| "If you're of European descent, for example, you share more
| with the Hadza than you do with those of East Asian descent
| -- as they also share more with the Hadza than they would
| with you."
|
| How? Hadza would be about 3/1000th Neanderthal while both
| Europens and East Asians are about 20/1000th. Because home
| sapiens mated with them after leaving Africa and there wasn't
| much gene flow back into Africa. Even if that weren't the
| case I don't understand the reasoning behind your comment.
| crazygringo wrote:
| In a nutshell it's about genetic diversity. Subsaharan
| Africans include virtually all of the set of homo sapiens
| genes (save for mutations that occurred later on
| elsewhere), while populations outside of Africa have only
| select subsets of genes, due to the limited diversity in
| small migratory groups.
|
| So if you're European, for example, nearly all the genes
| you have can also be found in the Subsaharan African
| population, but many of your genes can't be found in the
| East Asian population at all.
|
| (I'm not considering Neanderthal genes at all, as those are
| a comparatively very small portion of genes.)
|
| I'm not an expert in this and I don't have numbers here,
| but this is what I was taught in college anthropology at
| least regarding genetic variation worldwide.
| nradov wrote:
| The climate and available foods near Olduvai Gorge were quite
| different when hominids evolved there. I suspect the current
| Hadza diet is substantially different from that of our
| ancient ancestors. Temporal distance matters as much as
| geographic distance.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Ok. Please write your autobiography. :-)
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| One thing it teaches us is that meat & animal products,
| especially fat, has been a central part of the diet for most of
| our ancestral tribal cultures.
|
| Since dairy, meat and animal fats are being vilified at the
| moment by the modern nutritional zeitgeist. It might be worth
| being skeptical of such a strong rejection of these food
| categories.
|
| Especially since we can't figure out the root causes of certain
| modern diseases as autoimmune, extreme rise in cancers,
| neurological and heart disease.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| A large part from that is due to the abhorrent conditions
| that most meat is produced in and the fact that (IIRC)
| livestock amounts to 15 times the biomass of all wild mammals
| combined right now. If you tally up land used to feed
| livestock and all the other side effects of the meat
| industry, it doesn't look very sustainable to me. It's kinda
| hard to have almost 8 billion people live like hunter
| gatherers I guess.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| I agree the situation in many stables is abhorrent.
|
| However. Online im able to get meat from "wild" cows who
| roam free in certain "nature" areas.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Imagine trying to scale this sort of thing so it can
| serve everyone instead of a narrow affluent slice of the
| most affluent societies.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I eat grass-fed local cows and its almost half the price
| per lb as regular ground beef at Walmart, and obviously
| includes every cut there is.
|
| We probably need to increase the number of farms and
| farmers, and decentralize agriculture. Bonus side effect:
| it's more resilient to shocks like Covid taking out a few
| meat packing plants or a natural disaster taking out the
| massive Smithfield facility in Virginia.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| It sounds like scale is the problem.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Having consumed something for a long time doesn't mean that
| thing fits our health goals today. e.g. saturated fat
| contributes to heart disease but didn't stop us from
| reproducing.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| There is no evidence that it causes heart disease:
|
| "Collectively, neither observational studies, prospective
| epidemiologic cohort studies, RCTs, systematic reviews and
| meta analyses have conclusively established a significant
| association between SFA in the diet and subsequent
| cardiovascular risk and CAD, MI or mortality nor a benefit
| of reducing dietary SFAs on CVD rick, events and mortality.
| Beneficial effects of replacement of SFA by polyunsaturated
| or monounsaturated fat or carbohydrates remain elusive. "
|
| See study: https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article-
| abstract/doi...
|
| The point is. There are certain diseases much more
| prevelant now than in these tribal cultures. Why is that?
| Less exposure to parasites, food, movement, exposure to
| chemicals?
| nradov wrote:
| The best evidence we have now is that sugar consumption is
| a far worse risk factor for heart disease than saturated
| fat. The amount of saturated fat in your bloodstream has
| little relation to the amount you eat.
|
| https://peterattiamd.com/donlayman/
| Retric wrote:
| Ware patterns are a very long term effect. Hunter gathering was
| a seasonal diet so they would have eaten more grains in some
| periods and less in others.
|
| In areas with abundant natural grains it's likely their diets
| did consist primarily of grains for some portion of the year.
| From a survival standpoint low effort and especially low risk
| calories are really hard to ignore.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There is nothing low effort about grains. They don't simply
| grow abundantly in nature without other animals eating them.
| In addition, before manual cultivation, wild, non selectively
| bred grains were nothing like modern grains.
| dahart wrote:
| That might be true, but humans have had granaries to store
| grains and whatever else they can gather, for more than ten
| thousand years. Whatever the effort was, we know people
| were gathering grains like corn. You can visit granaries
| all over the American west. They're in South America and
| the Middle East as well, along with some evidence that
| manual cultivation was taking place ten thousand years ago
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26314333_Evidence_
| f...
| Retric wrote:
| Canadian wild rice for example gets extremely abundant
| without simply being eaten by wild animals. That's likely
| representative of what similar ecosystems in other areas
| would have looked like.
|
| In terms of energy gained vs lost harvesting and processing
| Canadian wild rice using traditional methods is a huge net
| gain. That said in terms of diet, wild grains have a
| noticeably different nutritional profile so aren't a direct
| analog of of modern agriculture.
| hinkley wrote:
| We've forgotten how many cultures ate acorns when they were
| available. Acorns are about 40% carbs. Unlike apples and
| many other tree nuts, there's not a lot of evidence they
| have been selectively bred for larger fruits. "Native" oaks
| produce a noteworthy amount of nuts.
|
| But the thing with nuts is that they have multi year cycles
| to break the foraging ladder. Every few years the whole
| forest produces five times as many seeds as in a normal
| year, and then famine and predation pulls the nut eating
| population back down.
|
| Only humans are clever enough to really exploit those
| patterns. A child would learn to make acorn bread, but
| couldn't count on it being available except for short
| periods and then every so many years.
|
| [edit to add] if memory serves, in the modern era we are
| down to some First Nations populations and Korea for
| cultures that still eat acorns regularly.
| layer8 wrote:
| I believe the paleo crowd doesn't argue against nuts.
| hinkley wrote:
| Yes, but, acorns stand out as one of the starchiest nuts,
| which is why they make bread out of it.
|
| A modern walnut for instance is about 18g of fat, 4 of
| protein, and 4 of carbs per ounce. And while the size of
| the fruit would have been increased under cultivation,
| I'm not sure the mix of nutrients would have shifted all
| that far. A 'modern' acorn is 6.8:1.7:11.5. That is a
| starch.
|
| The limiting factor with acorns is that if you eat them
| raw the tannins will get you. You have to soak it out
| before eating them. We've had pottery for at least twice
| as long as the time since the end of the Paleolithic era.
| If soaked in leather bags or nets, then much older than
| that. And since oak tannins are one of the older
| techniques for processing leather, I think it's safe to
| say we've been collecting them since the back end of
| forever.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Evidence for eating anything we could get our hands on,
| including quite a bit of meat, is abundant in paleoarchaeology.
|
| This is quite far from the truth. The hadza are specific about
| the foods they gather and are known to have a number of food
| taboos. Women and children are forbidden from eating hearts,
| for example, while men can't eat tortoises.
|
| Also, the carbs in the title are primarily coming from tubers,
| often called underground storage organs (USOs) in the
| literature. Grain is a much later thing, as you mentioned.
|
| The thing you're critiquing is ethnographic analogy. The sucks
| doesn't do a good job of clarifying this, but the accepted
| modern usage is not to say "this is exactly how ancient humans
| lived", but rather to illuminate a small part of the spectrum
| of possible lifeways and what constraints they might have been
| optimizing.
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