Neo Cave-men Diet & Lifestyle

[noblecaboose]

On Colbert Report last week, there was a guest, John Durant who was promoting his "New Cave-man" lifestyle. This article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fashion/10caveman.html)in the NY Times goes into the fad in more detail.
Now, to me, it seems like simultaneously a good idea and a bunch of bull-hockey.
That is, it seems ok in practice: Fruits, nuts, vegetables and meat. Low carb. Lots of exercise outside.
But the theory behind it seems a bit...iffy: We evolved to eat this way, so it's a healthier lifestyle because it's what our paleolithic ancestors did etc.

Now, my positive and negative responses to this are purely emotional. I don't have a degree in anthropology or anything, so I'm curious to find out whether this "Neo Cave-man" thing is actually based on science or just a rose coloured view of our ancestral "betters."

[arthwollipot]

I got the same impression as you did. My BS detector was going like the clappers all through the interview, but at the same time some of the things he said made a disturbing amount of sense. I could see a naturalistic fallacy through all of it, but the biggest thing (it seemed to me) was that he wasn't taking into account the fact that we have actually evolved since palaeolithic times. For example, we (Europeans) are now lactose-tolerant, where it strongly appears that our ancestors weren't.

[The Atheist]

Now, my positive and negative responses to this are purely emotional. I don't have a degree in anthropology or anything, so I'm curious to find out whether this "Neo Cave-man" thing is actually based on science or just a rose coloured view of our ancestral "betters."

Whether or not it's good for you is one thing, but it's certainly not based on science. Humans would have been largely scavengers and would have eaten an awful lot of bugs and probably, like gorillas, the occasional dung to keep you warm on a cold morning.

I'll certainly buy the guys they're interviewing maybe being ****-eaters, but when I see 'em chowing down on a plateful of witchety grubs, I'll believe they're following a cave-man regimen.

They appear to be the typical bodybuilder naturalists gone bush in the concrete jungle.

For example, we (Europeans) are now lactose-tolerant, where it strongly appears that our ancestors weren't.

You'd probably need to show why that's a good thing.

[Jorghnassen]

You'd probably need to show why that's a good thing.

Because milk is awesome with cookies? Or chocolatey desserts? And all those other lactose containing delicious things. And I dare you to eat what a cow eats in winter. See how worth it it is to become able to digest that.

[HansMustermann]

Well, "our ancestors evolved to..." sounds grrrreat, until you remember that our ancestors tended to not live long enough for a lot of things to matter at evolution scale. As late as viking-age Iceland, the average life expectancy was 20 years and only 1% to 3% reached 60 years old. In Old Kingdom ancient Egypt, if you got past the infant mortality spike, chances are 50-50 you'd be already dead by the mid-20's as a woman and by the mid-30's as a man. (Make it around 20 and 30 life expectancy at birth if you don't exclude the infant mortality.) Or as our closest relative, extremely few chimps reach 40 in the wild.

Our ancestors (well into the second millenium AD) started making kids as soon as they hit puberty, and most didn't live to see their own children marry.

Anything that would kill or cripple you in your later years, simply wouldn't matter at all for evolution. (Just like skin cancer or post-menopause osteoporosis were never solved by evolution, because they made no real difference to natural selection.)

What I'm getting at is: he wants to eat mainly meat and inner organs? Well, I hope he won't mind gout later. A high intake of purines tends to do that.

And I don't even necessarily mean _much_ later. We'll never know about the cavemen, but ancient Egyptians already knew about gout and left us a description of it dated around 2600 BC and the use of Colchicum as a cure since about 1500 BC. (Still used to this day.) So you didn't have to live awfully long to start noticing it.

That a dairy diet can help avoid gout (milk and cheese contain much less purines) is known since at least 30 AD. But I guess that's out of cavemen times, so he won't benefit from that ;)

Fish, game meat (that a caveman would eat) and organs have one of the highest amounts of purines you can find in a food. By comparison some more modern pork and beef actually have a lot less, being only in the "moderate" range as opposed to "high".

Plant diets range between "moderate" and "low", but a lot of the "low" category is stuff you need to boil or otherwise cook to subsist on. And while not strictly out of caveman times, I get the impression that it might not be the kind of diet he has in mind.

So basically, yes, it's stupid.

[HansMustermann]

You'd probably need to show why that's a good thing.

Compared to his diet, see above: milk is very low on purines, game meat is very high.

[zooterkin]

That is, it seems ok in practice: Fruits, nuts, vegetables and meat. Low carb. Lots of exercise outside.
But the theory behind it seems a bit...iffy: We evolved to eat this way, so it's a healthier lifestyle because it's what our paleolithic ancestors did etc.


It's also ignoring the fact that most the plants we eat have been bred selectively by man, so they are no longer what we evolved to eat.

[quadraginta]

<snip>

You'd probably need to show why that's a good thing.


Cheese.














For bacon cheeseburgers.

:D

[casebro]

Is less lactose intolerance due to genetics, or is it due to lifestyle?

If children, almost all of who can digest lactose, keep drinking whole milk (from cows instead of Mom), many of them will maintain the ability to digest the sugars in milk. Just as taking drugs for long periods encourages the liver to make more of the enzymes needed to break down the drugs. This leads to 'tolerance', or needing higher doses to get the same effect, because the greater amount of enzymes will break down the drug faster.

Has Man made any genetic evolution in the 6,000 years since agriculture became established? Or have we abrogated further evolution because society feeds the poor, stupid, and sick?

[Loss Leader]

We evolved to eat this way, so it's a healthier lifestyle because it's what our paleolithic ancestors did etc.


I think it's important to know how we evolved so that we can understand our the way our brains and bodies respond to food. In that way, we can take positive action instead of just being driven by our desires. For example, it may be good to understand why we crave sweets.

However, the "cave man" phase of human evolution lasted for hundreds of thousands of years and covered almost all the inhabitable land that could be walked to. It lasted through ice ages and through the extinction of all manner of species - including almost all the megafauna on land. It lasted through serious human destruction of forests and plains, including human contribution to the growth of the Sahara.

There was no one diet that our ancestors shared. There is probably very little in common between the diets of some successful tribes on one end of the earth, and other successful tribes at the other end. The best that could be said is that all human prehistoric diets consisted mainly of food.

The cave man fad seems like it is not, and cannot ever be, based on science.

[jillianbean]

There is something to be said for a "diet" that encourages eating natural food and getting excercise. What a freakin' novel concept. But if you've been eating something (milk, gluten, whatever) for your entire life and never had any health problems, there's no reason you should suddenly stop just because some dude tells you those items aren't what the cavepeoples ate 10,000 years ago.

Here's a random factoid: Soy is heavily laden with estrogen, and it's a common theory that the proliferation of soy in the eastern Asian diet has directly caused a lack of sexual dimorphism in modern Asian populations. Saying the Paleolithic diet is going to improve your health all of a sudden is like saying if you're a man and you eat a lot of soy, you're going to start looking like a woman.

We do still biologically have remnants of caveman evolutionary traits, such as the fact that we retain more fat and have trouble losing weight in the winter. Even though in the modern age we have clothing and heating to keep us warm, our bodies are still thinking that they need to retain as much fat as possible to keep body temperature up. This diet is just a bastardization of this idea.

I hate fad diets so much, in case you couldn't tell.

[noblecaboose]

I got the same impression as you did. My BS detector was going like the clappers all through the interview, but at the same time some of the things he said made a disturbing amount of sense. I could see a naturalistic fallacy through all of it, but the biggest thing (it seemed to me) was that he wasn't taking into account the fact that we have actually evolved since palaeolithic times. For example, we (Europeans) are now lactose-tolerant, where it strongly appears that our ancestors weren't.

That's what I meant to say! It totally smacks of the naturalistic fallacy. I checked out the guy's Twitter page and he's very "Ooh, the health care system is treating symptoms instead of the causes of illness! Wah!" implying that nutrition and exercise will prevent what ails us. A common cry of the alt-med folks.

And by the way, I'm not exactly lactose tolerant :(. I think it might be because of my Native American ancestry.

It's also ignoring the fact that most the plants we eat have been bred selectively by man, so they are no longer what we evolved to eat.

They do address that in the article. One of the men refuses to eat tomatoes or anything in the nightshade family because it wouldn't have been available to our paleolithic ancestors. This raises the question, what vegetables does he eat? Pine nuts? Wild berries? Sorrel?

Is less lactose intolerance due to genetics, or is it due to lifestyle?

If children, almost all of who can digest lactose, keep drinking whole milk (from cows instead of Mom), many of them will maintain the ability to digest the sugars in milk. Just as taking drugs for long periods encourages the liver to make more of the enzymes needed to break down the drugs. This leads to 'tolerance', or needing higher doses to get the same effect, because the greater amount of enzymes will break down the drug faster.


Last time I checked, lactase persistence was a genetic mutation. Lactose intolerance, occurring in 70% of the world's population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance#Nomenclature), is still the norm today.
I don't produce lactase, despite the fact that I did continue to drink milk into my late teens. It was only when I was 19 that I noticed my frequent bouts of painful gas and indigestion were triggered whenever I consumed large amounts of milk or milk products (i.e. a large glass of milk, a bowl of ice cream etc.). Neither of my parents ever had this problem but probably because lactase persistence is a dominant trait.

[GreenLines]

Dr. Al Sears proposed exercise with the side that, "It's what our ancestors did". It constantly was running through my mind about life expectancy being a half to a third of what "our ancestors" had.

[blutoski]

You'd probably need to show why that's a good thing.

The benefit is that we can live off of dairy as adults.

The theory is that during periods of food shortage hardship, a community that did not have to kill its cattle to survive (ie: can use milk) would be at an advantage over those that did (ie had to eat the meat).

[blutoski]

Is less lactose intolerance due to genetics, or is it due to lifestyle?

Genetics.

[blutoski]

Dr. Al Sears proposed exercise with the side that, "It's what our ancestors did". It constantly was running through my mind about life expectancy being a half to a third of what "our ancestors" had.

Life expectancy estimates depend on what period of ancestry is being discussed.

There is good reason to believe that our pre-agricultural ancestors were pretty healthy and lived a relatively long life. Low populatoin densities meant contagious illnesses and warfare were probably much rarer 25,000 years ago than, say, 5,000 years ago.

One of the interesting things about finding remains from ancestral species such as H. erectus (OK: that's going very far back), is that they looked damn healthy. Turkana boy was tall (a 6'1" 8 or 12 year old) and obviously very strong. He had great teeth when he died what looks like an accidental death.

[HansMustermann]

Here's a random factoid: Soy is heavily laden with estrogen, and it's a common theory that the proliferation of soy in the eastern Asian diet has directly caused a lack of sexual dimorphism in modern Asian populations. Saying the Paleolithic diet is going to improve your health all of a sudden is like saying if you're a man and you eat a lot of soy, you're going to start looking like a woman.

Actually, it may well be the other way around.

Phytoestrogens (estrogens from plants) -- which nowadays are often sold as breast enhancement supplements -- seem to actually be marginally counter-productive as an estrogen replacement.

A) The vast majority are actually far weaker than the real estrogen, but

B) They all bind to the same receptors, often out-competing the real thing

I.e., you may actually end up looking slightly more male-like as a woman, as opposed to the other way around.

In males, studies showed pretty much no influence on males. The sperm count, mobility, testicular volume or ejaculate volume, show no measurable change. Other hormonal influences are minor at best.

Even the effects during childhood in males are still at the speculation stage whether they might exist at all.

But perhaps more reassuring, phytoestrogens aren't really soy-only. Various amounts exist in wheat, barley, oats sesame seed, berries, beans, lentils, hops, apples, carrots, several kinds of spices, etc. If you didn't turn more feminine by eating your veggies, chances are soy won't make you more feminine either. Sorry.

Heck, by virtue of its being in hops and all cereals, practically all beer and to a lesser extent whiskey are contaminated by phytoestrogens.

[HansMustermann]

Life expectancy estimates depend on what period of ancestry is being discussed.

There is good reason to believe that our pre-agricultural ancestors were pretty healthy and lived a relatively long life. Low populatoin densities meant contagious illnesses and warfare were probably much rarer 25,000 years ago than, say, 5,000 years ago.

One of the interesting things about finding remains from ancestral species such as H. erectus (OK: that's going very far back), is that they looked damn healthy. Turkana boy was tall (a 6'1" 8 or 12 year old) and obviously very strong. He had great teeth when he died what looks like an accidental death.

Except other fossils show signs of being severely malnourished as children, and others are in mass graves. The Cemetery 117 site is from 13,000-14,000 years ago and it's a mass grave after a battle.

The end of paleolithic for example also shows a rather notable general population decrease, and it's probably not for lack of having sex, if you get my drift ;)

But I don't think warfare is the main problem anyway. The Old Kingdom era of ancient Egypt is characterized by peace. Between Narmer's unification and the Hyskos invasion, they were very much bottled in by the desert. They had a nasty civil war at the end of the first intermediate period, but that was such a notable thing that it even got included in the religion, e.g., in the Heavenly Cow legend and given a special festival. Otherwise, probably the best testimony for their isolation is that they survived for almost a millenium and a half with an army that was over 1000 years obsolete compared to their neighbours.

Also no major plagues are mentioned to the best of my knowledge.

That didn't prevent their life expectancy from being pretty crappy.

And, again, look at the chimps in the wild. It's estimated that extremely few reach 40, although in captivity they can live to over 60, i.e., comparable to humans.

[jillianbean]

Actually, it may well be the other way around.

Phytoestrogens (estrogens from plants) -- which nowadays are often sold as breast enhancement supplements -- seem to actually be marginally counter-productive as an estrogen replacement.

A) The vast majority are actually far weaker than the real estrogen, but

B) They all bind to the same receptors, often out-competing the real thing

I.e., you may actually end up looking slightly more male-like as a woman, as opposed to the other way around.

In males, studies showed pretty much no influence on males. The sperm count, mobility, testicular volume or ejaculate volume, show no measurable change. Other hormonal influences are minor at best.

Even the effects during childhood in males are still at the speculation stage whether they might exist at all.

But perhaps more reassuring, phytoestrogens aren't really soy-only. Various amounts exist in wheat, barley, oats sesame seed, berries, beans, lentils, hops, apples, carrots, several kinds of spices, etc. If you didn't turn more feminine by eating your veggies, chances are soy won't make you more feminine either. Sorry.

Heck, by virtue of its being in hops and all cereals, practically all beer and to a lesser extent whiskey are contaminated by phytoestrogens.

This was great info. I may have had my facts backwards, this was something we offhandedly discussed in my last physical anthropology class.

[John Jones]

Here's a random factoid: Soy is heavily laden with estrogen, and it's a common theory that the proliferation of soy in the eastern Asian diet has directly caused a lack of sexual dimorphism in modern Asian populations.

Phytoestrogens may be more common in the eastern Asian diet, but it doesn't seem to have hindered their capacity for sexual reproduction.

[Mongrel]

The theory is that during periods of food shortage hardship, a community that did not have to kill its cattle to survive (ie: can use milk) would be at an advantage over those that did (ie had to eat the meat).

Don't forget, milk is a nutritionally bloody good. For the minor effort of penning in a few fields, keeping the predators away (after breeding for less aggressive cattle) and letting them graze you get a Cow's milk contains, on average, 3.4% protein, 3.6% fat, and 4.6% lactose, 0.7% minerals[30] and supplies 66 kcal of energy per 100 grams. (wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_milk#Nutrition_and_health)) as well as a host of vitamins and minerals.

[arthwollipot]

You'd probably need to show why that's a good thing.Not really, no. Whether it's a good or a bad thing is irrelvant. The point is that it's different from our palaeolithic ancestors. We have evolved.

[orpheus]

Well, "our ancestors evolved to..." sounds grrrreat, until you remember that our ancestors tended to not live long enough for a lot of things to matter at evolution scale. As late as viking-age Iceland, the average life expectancy was 20 years and only 1% to 3% reached 60 years old. In Old Kingdom ancient Egypt, if you got past the infant mortality spike, chances are 50-50 you'd be already dead by the mid-20's as a woman and by the mid-30's as a man. (Make it around 20 and 30 life expectancy at birth if you don't exclude the infant mortality.) Or as our closest relative, extremely few chimps reach 40 in the wild.

Our ancestors (well into the second millenium AD) started making kids as soon as they hit puberty, and most didn't live to see their own children marry.

Anything that would kill or cripple you in your later years, simply wouldn't matter at all for evolution. (Just like skin cancer or post-menopause osteoporosis were never solved by evolution, because they made no real difference to natural selection.)

What I'm getting at is: he wants to eat mainly meat and inner organs? Well, I hope he won't mind gout later. A high intake of purines tends to do that.

And I don't even necessarily mean _much_ later. We'll never know about the cavemen, but ancient Egyptians already knew about gout and left us a description of it dated around 2600 BC and the use of Colchicum as a cure since about 1500 BC. (Still used to this day.) So you didn't have to live awfully long to start noticing it.

That a dairy diet can help avoid gout (milk and cheese contain much less purines) is known since at least 30 AD. But I guess that's out of cavemen times, so he won't benefit from that ;)

Fish, game meat (that a caveman would eat) and organs have one of the highest amounts of purines you can find in a food. By comparison some more modern pork and beef actually have a lot less, being only in the "moderate" range as opposed to "high".

Plant diets range between "moderate" and "low", but a lot of the "low" category is stuff you need to boil or otherwise cook to subsist on. And while not strictly out of caveman times, I get the impression that it might not be the kind of diet he has in mind.

So basically, yes, it's stupid.

+1

[blutoski]

Except other fossils show signs of being severely malnourished as children, and others are in mass graves. The Cemetery 117 site is from 13,000-14,000 years ago and it's a mass grave after a battle.

The end of paleolithic for example also shows a rather notable general population decrease, and it's probably not for lack of having sex, if you get my drift ;)

But I don't think warfare is the main problem anyway. The Old Kingdom era of ancient Egypt is characterized by peace. Between Narmer's unification and the Hyskos invasion, they were very much bottled in by the desert. They had a nasty civil war at the end of the first intermediate period, but that was such a notable thing that it even got included in the religion, e.g., in the Heavenly Cow legend and given a special festival. Otherwise, probably the best testimony for their isolation is that they survived for almost a millenium and a half with an army that was over 1000 years obsolete compared to their neighbours.

Also no major plagues are mentioned to the best of my knowledge.

That didn't prevent their life expectancy from being pretty crappy.

Still, though, I'm responding to the hypothesis offered in the opening post, which refers to a preagricultural diet. Fairest comparison would be questions about life expectancy - excluding risk of war and accident - in a preindustrial H. sap. population.

Unfortunately, life expectancy tends to be a mean average derived from bimodal death peaks in early childhood and late adulthood. Natural non-accidental deaths 10kya were probably trimodal: both sexes of children from illness, women of childbearing age during childbirth, and then both sexes in old age from organ failure or overwhelming infection again.

Even if we're talking about malnutrition, this is not the same as their preferred diet that the claimant would describe as more natural for us.

I'm not saying that I agree with the claimant (I don't). What I'm saying is that showing these people fought wars and enslaved their captives, or had poor medical technology, or frequent accidents is not a counter-argument to reject claims about whether their ideal available diet was healthier than ours.





And, again, look at the chimps in the wild. It's estimated that extremely few reach 40, although in captivity they can live to over 60, i.e., comparable to humans.

Yes, but this is beyond comparing antique humans to modern humans. That's another genera with a dramatically lower capacity for environmental manipulation.

[The Atheist]

Not really, no. Whether it's a good or a bad thing is irrelvant. The point is that it's different from our palaeolithic ancestors. We have evolved.

Good way for you to be completely wrong actually, because it's bleeding obvious that the diets are different, otherwise there wouldn't be a subject for the OP to exist! We have evolved to eat it, big deal.

The only thing which matters is whether it's better for people than what neolithic men ate.

With milk, it's not clear cut. Maybe if everyone ate it in the right proportions it would be more obvious, but we don't, generally.

[Bikewer]

Gee, just when I was about to refine my flint-knapping skillls...

As noted, many of the plant foods we consider staples would not have been available to our ancestors; they are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding.

I remember reading in Harris' book, "Good To Eat", that lactose tolerance was common in Northern European peoples, where long periods of low sunlight made vitamin D deficiency a problem.
Folks from sunnier climes tend to be lactose-intolerant as they got plenty of sunshine...

[cornsail]

I'm pretty sure my ancestors did not evolve drinking filtered water or rubbing soap and disinfectants on their bodies. My genes have obviously been optimized for drinking river water and shunning high-tech sorcery like washing machines. Alpha-male-dom here I come!

[cornsail]

Carbs rule, cavemen drool!

[HansMustermann]

I'm not saying that I agree with the claimant (I don't). What I'm saying is that showing these people fought wars and enslaved their captives, or had poor medical technology, or frequent accidents is not a counter-argument to reject claims about whether their ideal available diet was healthier than ours.

What I'm saying though is that that life expectancy is key to understanding _evolution_. Since the "we evolved to eat X" is the usual waved around argument in this kind of woo. And then I think it's only fair to discuss how evolution really works, which factors were evolutionary pressures, and which weren't even factors at all-

E.g., a diet that would give you horrible gout in the 60's wouldn't even matter at all, if less than 1% of the population lives to the age of 60. There simply wouldn't be any "evolution" based on it either way.

[blutoski]

What I'm saying though is that that life expectancy is key to understanding _evolution_. Since the "we evolved to eat X" is the usual waved around argument in this kind of woo. And then I think it's only fair to discuss how evolution really works, which factors were evolutionary pressures, and which weren't even factors at all-

E.g., a diet that would give you horrible gout in the 60's wouldn't even matter at all, if less than 1% of the population lives to the age of 60. There simply wouldn't be any "evolution" based on it either way.

True, but this is where the problem of measurement approach comes in. If the population's average age of death is increased from 40 to 80, but this is achieved by reducing infant mortality from 50% to 0%, rather than extending the age of death, it's important to identify this.

My point is that there is an unrealistic impression that human lifespan was typically quite short until recently, which isn't a good description.

[HansMustermann]

Well, I wouldn't know about cavemen times, but I can tell you that in either ancient Egypt or viking age Iceland... well, let's just say you're IMHO erring in the other direction. Massively.

For Egypt, the funny thing is, we don't have to guess much or identify imaginary factors. Those guys wrote a lot about their deceased, and there are name plates and scrolls and whatnot. You can plot the age of death on X and the number of deaths at that age on Y. And literally, no kidding, no idealizing, no exaggeration: the second peak is around 25 for women and around 35 for men. Those who _didn't_ die as an infant, by that age half of them would be dead already.

By New Kingdom times, it had increased by almost 10 years for both, but that's really it.

In viking age Iceland, literally, half the population was under 15. Of those who reached 20, maybe half or so reached 50. Some 15% or so of the population was over 50. And 1% to 3% actually reached 60.

The notion that they lived about as much as a modern human, except for infant mortality, is plain old false. Yes, they really died young.

The unrealistic modern impression is precisely that kind imagining that they must have lived until 80, save for a lot of infant mortality. But that's plain old false. They really genuinely died earlier.

[luchog]

This was great info. I may have had my facts backwards, this was something we offhandedly discussed in my last physical anthropology class.
Phytoestrogens are a common scapegoat in sCAM and woo nutritional theories. Many medical woos claim that phytoestrogens are a major contributing factor for breast cancer, with soy being number one on their axis of evil food. This despite the fact phytoestrogens are not normally absorbed from food, and that Asian populations with a high percentagy of dietary soy products have a breast cancer rate, and breast cancer survival rate, that is superior to American and British populations. Dietary fat intake is far more closely linked to breast cancer than phytoestrogens.

Strangely, I found out about this, not through skeptical sources; but via TS/TG transition resources. There was a considerable amount of debate for years about the efficacy of phytoestrogens as part of a transition regime; and the eventual consensus was that the empirical data pointed to them being effectively useless. No significant feminizing effect at all; even using high-concentrate extracts rather than sourced from food.

[ponderingturtle]

Is less lactose intolerance due to genetics, or is it due to lifestyle?

If children, almost all of who can digest lactose, keep drinking whole milk (from cows instead of Mom), many of them will maintain the ability to digest the sugars in milk. Just as taking drugs for long periods encourages the liver to make more of the enzymes needed to break down the drugs. This leads to 'tolerance', or needing higher doses to get the same effect, because the greater amount of enzymes will break down the drug faster.

Has Man made any genetic evolution in the 6,000 years since agriculture became established? Or have we abrogated further evolution because society feeds the poor, stupid, and sick?

There is a well established gene that is involved. It seems to have occured in several areas independantly as well. Now diet might play a roll as well.

[Darat]

Don't forget, milk is a nutritionally bloody good. For the minor effort of penning in a few fields, keeping the predators away (after breeding for less aggressive cattle) and letting them graze you get a (wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_milk#Nutrition_and_health)) as well as a host of vitamins and minerals.

And something we often overlook with our refrigerated food supply chain, it is regular fresh food.

[Dancing David]

Um, first off, what the heck is a 'caveman', do we even have a definition for that? :D


But then lots of exercise, good.
Lots of plant material, good.
Lots of malnutrition, not so good.

It is always a mistake to say "we evolved to", we evolved because of reproduction.

[Number Six]

I wanted to be the one to point out that "we evolved to" doesn't mean much but others beat me to it. I think a better way of saying it than "We evolved to eat X" is "We evolved eating X." Saying "we evolved to" implies purpose and it implies optimality. If that's a word, that is. I mean, saying "we evolved to" implies that we should eat the same thing now as we were eating when we evolved. But while what we were eating when we evolved was good enough to keep us going, it isn't necessarily optimal or best.

We can put anything in our mouths. What is best? I don't know. But I don't see why whatever it is that's best should automatically turn out to be natural or unnatural or X or Y or Z. Whatever is best is whatever turns out to be best for us when we eat it.

[cornsail]

Um, first off, what the heck is a 'caveman', do we even have a definition for that? :D

Probably the "Cro-Magnon" (humans who migrated to Europe from Africa around 30k years ago) or Neanderthals. I think Neanderthals were more dependent on caves than the Cro-Magnon who could adapt well to the cave-free regions, so they would fit the term best, but obviously we wouldn't want to include Neanderthals in this context...

Rumor has it there was a Cro-Magnon fad for awhile called the "Neo Grasslander Diet & Lifestyle" based on the idea that their African ancestors had not evolved to eat mammoths or wear heavy clothing. It didn't work out too well.

[Roboramma]

Well, I wouldn't know about cavemen times, but I can tell you that in either ancient Egypt or viking age Iceland... well, let's just say you're IMHO erring in the other direction. Massively.

For Egypt, the funny thing is, we don't have to guess much or identify imaginary factors. Those guys wrote a lot about their deceased, and there are name plates and scrolls and whatnot. You can plot the age of death on X and the number of deaths at that age on Y. And literally, no kidding, no idealizing, no exaggeration: the second peak is around 25 for women and around 35 for men. Those who _didn't_ die as an infant, by that age half of them would be dead already.

By New Kingdom times, it had increased by almost 10 years for both, but that's really it.

In viking age Iceland, literally, half the population was under 15. Of those who reached 20, maybe half or so reached 50. Some 15% or so of the population was over 50. And 1% to 3% actually reached 60.

The notion that they lived about as much as a modern human, except for infant mortality, is plain old false. Yes, they really died young.

The unrealistic modern impression is precisely that kind imagining that they must have lived until 80, save for a lot of infant mortality. But that's plain old false. They really genuinely died earlier.


But you're comparing modern humans with other agricultural peoples, when the OP diet is talking about a hunter-gatherer style diet, which is completely different.

While I don't agree with everything he says, I found this article by Jared Diamond to be pretty interesting. http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/mistake_jared_diamond.pdf

One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the lllinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and lllinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A.D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these
early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter- gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in
the preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
(26 years is not much, but certainly there are factors other than diet that impact upon that, what's interesting the the difference between those two figures)

All of this argues that pre-agricultural societies may have had better diets than post-agricultural societies. What I consider to be one leap too far is to suggest that pre-agricultural societies had a better diet than those of people living in modern first world countries. Actually, it's not a point he makes in the article, but its certainly implicit in the claims of the diet in the OP.

Still, I do think that if we want to understand human nutrition, understanding the environment in which we evolved, and the foods which we adapted to eating is an important part of that.

[zooterkin]

I wanted to be the one to point out that "we evolved to" doesn't mean much but others beat me to it. I think a better way of saying it than "We evolved to eat X" is "We evolved eating X." Saying "we evolved to" implies purpose and it implies optimality. If that's a word, that is. I mean, saying "we evolved to" implies that we should eat the same thing now as we were eating when we evolved. But while what we were eating when we evolved was good enough to keep us going, it isn't necessarily optimal or best.



You're right, 'we evolved to' is really a shorthand, which runs the risk of being misinterpreted.

What I was trying to say, above was, even if we evolved eating X, what these proponents of the 'New Caveman' diet are actually eating is Y, where Y is the result of years of selective breeding by man, unless they really are going out gathering berries from the original stock plants. The grains, fruit and vegetables we eat today are nothing like what was available to 'cave men'. This isn't really dealt with in the article, there is only the nod towards not eating tomatoes.

[Dancing David]

Probably the "Cro-Magnon" (humans who migrated to Europe from Africa around 30k years ago) or Neanderthals. I think Neanderthals were more dependent on caves than the Cro-Magnon who could adapt well to the cave-free regions, so they would fit the term best, but obviously we wouldn't want to include Neanderthals in this context...

Rumor has it there was a Cro-Magnon fad for awhile called the "Neo Grasslander Diet & Lifestyle" based on the idea that their African ancestors had not evolved to eat mammoths or wear heavy clothing. It didn't work out too well.

Except for the theory that gracile homosapiens, IE homo sapiens sapiens evolved in north afica, and there is no real data on the habitation of any of them really. Caves preserve stratigraphy very well, they are dry compared to other features on the landscape.

I am not arguing with you, the idea that people had to live in caves is silly.

[Dancing David]

There are theories about the cultivation of plants that leads to agriculture, hunter gathers may have engaged in some horticulture, but it is very speculative.

[Damien Evans]

On Colbert Report last week, there was a guest, John Durant who was promoting his "New Cave-man" lifestyle. This article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fashion/10caveman.html)in the NY Times goes into the fad in more detail.
Now, to me, it seems like simultaneously a good idea and a bunch of bull-hockey.
That is, it seems ok in practice: Fruits, nuts, vegetables and meat. Low carb. Lots of exercise outside.
But the theory behind it seems a bit...iffy: We evolved to eat this way, so it's a healthier lifestyle because it's what our paleolithic ancestors did etc.

Now, my positive and negative responses to this are purely emotional. I don't have a degree in anthropology or anything, so I'm curious to find out whether this "Neo Cave-man" thing is actually based on science or just a rose coloured view of our ancestral "betters."

If what I'm hearing is correct they don't cook their meat. Needless to say, cavemen were rather fond of cooking meat over a fire. Epic Fail.

[Dancing David]

If what I'm hearing is correct they don't cook their meat. Needless to say, cavemen were rather fond of cooking meat over a fire. Epic Fail.

Definitely homo saapiens cooked meat. Now in earlier homo predecessors, eating carrion was most likely a strategy. IE smashing bones for the marrow, after the big predators had eaten and the smaller predators had cleaned.

[cornsail]

Except for the theory that gracile homosapiens, IE homo sapiens sapiens evolved in north afica, and there is no real data on the habitation of any of them really.

Yeah I'm just saying the environment in which our species evolved would have been different from that of the 'cavemen'.

[blutoski]

For those who weren't aware, a variation of this ancestry model is part of the reasoning behind D'Adamo's [Blood type diet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_diet)].

Here's Quackwatch's review of his book: [Book Review: Eat Right 4 Your Type (1996) (http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/NegativeBR/d'adamo.html)]

[cornsail]

Oh geez, I knew a therapist (not professionally... roommate of a friend) who advocated the blood type diet. It's the same type of evolutionary argument, except even more laughable.

[cornsail]

When will people learn that teleological arguments are weak sauce?! Use them to form hypotheses, fine, but until you've demonstrated something empirically an unsupported hypothesis is all you've got.

[blutoski]

When will people learn that teleological arguments are weak sauce?! Use them to form hypotheses, fine, but until you've demonstrated something empirically an unsupported hypothesis is all you've got.

One of the best definitions of healthfraud I use is "Practice by hypothesis."

ie: This sounds plausible, so I'm prescribing it.

I think skeptics and those experienced in scientific experimentation are in the unique position of understanding that the vast, vast, majority of plausible hypotheses that humans have proposed since the dawn of time are absolutely wrong.

[Mongrel]

And something we often overlook with our refrigerated food supply chain, it is regular fresh food.

Indeed, I did overlook it :o

Another thing I overlooked was cheese! (Grommit).

Compared to milk or meat, cheese is very forgiving about it's storage environments. If you've got a cool place to mature it to a hard cheese (Cheddar for example) it becomes even more 'robust'.

[quadraginta]

Indeed, I did overlook it :o

Another thing I overlooked was cheese! (Grommit).

Compared to milk or meat, cheese is very forgiving about it's storage environments. If you've got a cool place to mature it to a hard cheese (Cheddar for example) it becomes even more 'robust'.


I mentioned it in post #8 (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=5600275&postcount=8) in regard to diminishing lactose intolerance and possible evolutionary impetus, but I added a 'bacon' one-liner, so it probably was overlooked in the ensuing general hilarity.

:)

...

:(

[ysabella]

I've seen a lot of people trying to eat "paleo" on a major low-carb forum I visit. So, these are a mix of people looking for weight loss, and some just looking for some kind of optimum health. Paleo-types argue quite a lot about what they should be eating, usually based on this person reading Loren Cordain and that person reading someone else. I will say, they do know that plants today are different from plants of yester-era.

A lot of them seem to think that before agriculture, nobody ate any grains. I don't see why we would have started trying to grow them, if that were true...?

What I find most confusing is that they generally agree that they should not eat any dairy, so most of them cheerfully replace it with coconut products. Coconut? Does that really make sense? Even if some cave-dwelling peoples might have had coconuts, they certainly didn't have the rather processed coconut milk and oil products, did they? I mean, it's okay with me if people want to eat coconuts, but it doesn't seem to fit, to my mind.

Some astonishing discussions I've seen had to do with eating not only raw, but "high" meat...meaning, somewhat rotted. Blech. A couple of American expats to Germany and the Netherlands were convinced that European shops which don't keep the eggs in a fridge are doing this because of special wisdom, and the same with people storing them on the counter at home. They figured that the eggs are being "aged" and get healthier and healthier over time! I think the truth has something more to do with the average temperature (ambient temperature in, say, Hamburg versus Virginia) and the cost of electricity. When I lived in the Netherlands, you paid more for the pre-chilled beer. There is some evidence that some fermented foods provide some nice benefits, but I don't think that means you should leave your chicken in the fridge until it's slimy.

One time, discussing organ meats, someone was saying that predator animals eat the intestines of prey, including contents, so we are meant to eat that, too. Um...isn't that...poop?

[Dancing David]

The paleo diet was manly plant products, just like other apes.

[The Atheist]

... the vast, vast, majority of plausible hypotheses that humans have proposed since the dawn of time are absolutely wrong.

Unfortunately, the converse works a bit in that some of the unlikeliest-sounding hypotheses have turned out to be some of the best things ever.

[Mongrel]

I mentioned it in post #8 (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=5600275&postcount=8) in regard to diminishing lactose intolerance and possible evolutionary impetus, but I added a 'bacon' one-liner, so it probably was overlooked in the ensuing general hilarity.

:)

...

:(

You did and I forgot it. My apologies :(