Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
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Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
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Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#2Around 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.
Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#3I'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.
Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#4I 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.
Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#5Our 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.
Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#6I'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…
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Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#7Our 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.
Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#8I 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.
Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#9I 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.
Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs
#10I'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…
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.