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Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

knowablemagazine.org

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Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#31
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#32

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 moder…

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.

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#33

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 moder…

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...

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#34
post #26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

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…

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.

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#35
post #4

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…

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 disease…

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.

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#36

They also had a median life expectancy of about 35 years, so I really struggle with the "paleo" concept for macronutrients.

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?

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#37
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.

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#38
post #4

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…

> 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 liv…

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.

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disease…

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.

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?

Re: Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet and it had carbs

#40
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)

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