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It shouldn't be terribly surprising that we do OK with "feast and famine", especially if you're young. I remember being 16 and eating an entire large NY pizza

It shouldn't be terribly surprising that we do OK with "feast and famine", especially if you're young. I remember being 16 and eating an entire large NY pizza for an afternoon snack before dinner... I assert without proof that it's the all-feast-all-the-time dietary novelty for most of humanity in the last, oh, 200 years that probably throws a spanner in the works.

centimeter 6y ago
Another complication is that most of our ancestors would probably only have been "feasting" on meat - there wouldn't have been any bread, sugar, palm oil, etc. in the mix.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's correct. Honey and fruit feasts are both quite common among extant forager groups in Africa. I don't see why our ancestors wouldn't have made use of the same resources.
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  that's at best a very contentious claim. Midden heaps tend to preserve bones longer than carrot-tops, though, which certainly skews the record. Certainly the vast majority of humanity throughout written history -- numerically, the bulk of our ancestry -- has subsisted primarily on non-meat foods, be they wheat, barley, maize, or whatever. Peasants were not regularly eating meat; often we have the written record to point to for that, as well as archaeological evidence from grave finds and the like. and my usual critique of "paleo" holds here, which is that it ignores evolution. As a species, we've evolved the persistence of digesting lactose at least twice, in independent subgroups, through two different metabolic pathways, so it's not like we're incapable of getting used to dietary shifts over the span of human history.
distrill 6y ago
My addition is purely anecdotal, but I've noticed in my family that it's the overweight members who make the most noise about overeating on holiday meals. It seems to me that they're not fat because of overeating during the holidays, they're fat because they overeat all year.

centimeter 6y ago

Another complication is that most of our ancestors would probably only have been "feasting" on meat - there wouldn't have been any bread, sugar, palm oil, etc. in the mix.

AlotOfReading 6y ago
I'm not sure that's correct. Honey and fruit feasts are both quite common among extant forager groups in Africa. I don't see why our ancestors wouldn't have made use of the same resources.
hprotagonist 6y ago
that's at best a very contentious claim. Midden heaps tend to preserve bones longer than carrot-tops, though, which certainly skews the record. Certainly the vast majority of humanity throughout written history -- numerically, the bulk of our ancestry -- has subsisted primarily on non-meat foods, be they wheat, barley, maize, or whatever. Peasants were not regularly eating meat; often we have the written record to point to for that, as well as archaeological evidence from grave finds and the like. and my usual critique of "paleo" holds here, which is that it ignores evolution. As a species, we've evolved the persistence of digesting lactose at least twice, in independent subgroups, through two different metabolic pathways, so it's not like we're incapable of getting used to dietary shifts over the span of human history.

distrill 6y ago

My addition is purely anecdotal, but I've noticed in my family that it's the overweight members who make the most noise about overeating on holiday meals. It seems to me that they're not fat because of overeating during the holidays, they're fat because they overeat all year.