9 ms·
How ancient people fell in love with bread, beer and other carbs
- kazishariar 5y agoYou're being funny, right? -Ancient people, pfft.
- pbourke 5y agoIf only ancient people knew about the paleo diet.
- xvilka 5y agoAnd modern people fell in love with sugar.
- treeman79 5y agoAh the old government food pyramid telling me that bread was good for me. So much damage done before I clued in how much it was affecting my health.
- seaorg 5y ago“ Taken together, these discoveries shred the long-standing idea that early people subsisted mainly on meat” No, they don’t. First of all, as is pointed out in the article, people were eating massive amounts of fat and meat right up till the Neolithic because without crops, there just wasn’t enough starchy stuff to sustain a population of people, not outside weird settlements like this one. And even if these people were eating starches 100,000 years ago, that’s a drop in the bucket. We have been eating meat and fat for millions of years, and the evidence is absolutely clear that a ketogenic carnivore diet is the healthiest diet. It works miracles on everyone who tries it. There are piles of people who cured themselves of very serious health problems with it.
- gautamcgoel 5y agoCan you expand a bit on the benefits of this diet? Aren't fruits and veggies essential for your health?
- reedjosh 5y agoTurns out you only need vitamin C and fiber if you're eating fructose or other sugars. There was a study in the early 1900s where two guys ate meat only for (I think) one year. I'll see if I can dig it up. Found it. Pdf warning http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf Downvote all you want, but it's true. Manny people do it today, and I've done it myself for a period. That said I'm not saying there aren't benefits to fruits and veg, just that you can be perfectly healthy without them.
- db48x 5y agoThis is extremely misleading, because you need a constant supply of vitamin C regardless of how much sugar you consume, and because you can get both vitamin C and fiber from meat. I’ve read that polar bear livers have so much vitamin C in them that you can actually poison yourself with them if you eat too many (personally I regard it as a rather remote circumstance).
- caymanjim 5y agoYou're mixing up vitamins. Meat doesn't contain any vitamin C; it's one of the few vitamins we need that you can't get from meat. And you can eat all the vitamin C you want. It's vitamin A that you have to be careful to avoid overdosing on, particularly from the livers of omnivores and carnivores.
- samatman 5y agoHalf right. He is mixing up vitamin A toxicity from some animal livers with vitamin C, but vitamin C is also found in liver, fish roe, and in small amounts in muscle. Adequate amounts? All I can tell you is that I know a small handful of people who have eaten an exclusively carnivore diet for years on end without suffering from scurvy.
- caymanjim 5y agoTIL. Seems that this was studied extensively in Inuit and other Alaskan populations that have a particularly meat-heavy diet.
- Retric 5y agoSignificant anthropological evidence exists that gathering not hunting provided the primary food source in primitive cultures. Outside of the Arctic circle there is simply an abundance of edible wild plants relative to the density of game animals. Further those plants don’t run away, foraging was simply the more dependable food source.
- TaupeRanger 5y agoYikes...this sounds almost religious. The truth is much more mundane and boring: we really don't know much about diet, aside from a handful of obvious things: don't eat too much sugar, don't eat trans fats, and try to get folic acid if you're pregnant. The final sentence really seals the deal on how little the OP understands diets. You can't look at anecdotes of someone "curing" themselves using a diet. That's how you get "miracle cures" using all sorts of random substances/fads. You have to do an actual randomized-controlled trial. Under controlled environments, the benefits of ketogenic diet are either nonexistent or moderate at best.
- gostsamo 5y agoSo, they were hunters and gatherers but they were only hunters. Who would've thought of a magic food tree?
- inopinatus 5y agoI was mostly with you up until: > the evidence is absolutely clear that a ketogenic carnivore diet is the healthiest diet There is no single blanket "healthiest diet". Dietary requirements vary, sometimes dramatically, across the gamut of humanity; and then: > It works miracles on everyone who tries it. There are piles of people who cured themselves of very serious health problems with it. That is a super misleading statement. A diet is not a miracle cure and should never be presented as one, because like all snake-oil health claims it sells false hope to the desperate. A low-GI diet may improve insulin resistance; a low calorie diet may improve obesity. Neither of these are certain outcomes, neither of them are cures for disease, and neither strategy even particularly requires a ketogenic carnivore diet.
- peanutz454 5y agoAs someone aproaching middle age and suddenly concious of health, I find claims like below... > It works miracles on everyone who tries it. There are piles of people who cured themselves of very serious health problems with it. ... very enticing. Then I wonder, if this were true, why isn't this backed by hard science? Even bad motives and bad statistics cannot hide miracles! I also wonder, if meat and fat based diet was the best for us, and yet humans AS A society (not as a person) evolved to eat card based diet obviously there has to be some advantage. What it is, I do not know, and I wish this would not change the subject, but the only thing that comes to mind is that eating carbs is the only sustainable way for our species. While these questions are unresolved, I eat meat once a week, and am otherwise vegatarian. Feeling healthy btw.
- nightski 5y agoNutritional science is far from a solved case and doesn't have a lot to lean on yet. Not only is there a lot of misinformation, money, and lying involved but the science itself is pretty poor as well. Most nutritional studies are based on p values in uncontrolled environments with self reporting. While the few more rigorous studies do control for confounding variables and attempt to control the environment more - they tend to be smaller. It's not like you can lock thousands of humans (let alone one) in a controlled environment for 50 years and study long term effects of diets which even then wouldn't be perfect. I'm not saying it's impossible, and science is the only way forward. I'm just that it is a mess and we know less than we think. FWIW I have been on a keto-genic diet for coming up on a decade now and feel fantastic as well. But like I said before, that's not worth much. I do it for the "brain" high I get on the diet and also it totally gets rid of my acid reflux issues.
- Swizec 5y agoThe problem is that any time we study populational positive effects of diet on health outcomes it always turns out that the secret ingredient was universal health care. Or at least the diet filters by “rich enough to have good insurance and access” We seem to have a hard time finding populations following any specific good diet with measurably good or better health outcomes than average that don’t have the compounding variable of access to health care:
- xwdv 5y agoWhy would anyone want to eat like Ancient people they didn’t live very long and died of horrible diseases.
- treeman79 5y agoInfection doesn’t much care about your diet. Cultures with excellent hygiene practices tended to do well.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ranci 5y agoWe have never found a cave painting of a loaf of bread. It was all hunting animals for meat. This is absolutely delusional.
- AlotOfReading 5y agoPutting on my early neolithic archaeologist hat, there are a lot of things that don't show up in art. The trend in the past decade has been that better methods and new inquiries are turning up even more evidence for early broad-spectrum plant use everywhere we look. e.g. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14723-0 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14723-0 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.12.014 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.12.014 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351402155_Diet_of_the_earliest_modern_humans_in_East_Asia https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351402155_Diet_of_t...
- CRConrad 5y ago1) Cave paintings may be related to religion. Hunting is fickle, you need to pray to the gods -- show them pictures of what you're after -- to get their help. Bread, baked from seeds gathered from plants, is more reliable; plants don't run away. So you don't need to paint any entreaties to the gods on how to help you get it. 2) Hunting, cave paintings and religion may have been related to one group of people, seed-gathering and baking to another. It may just not have occurred to the painters to include the activities and products of the gatherer side of the hunter-gatherer economy in their paintings.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoAncient people fell in love with food that lasted for long periods of time because there was no refrigeration (unless you were Inuit). Drying, smoking, fermenting, salting, pickling, etc. And, adding honey (for sugar).
- dang 5y agoAll: I realize that stories like this evoke a "wow you like beer and carbs too no way we should hang out" reaction, or equivalents, but please don't let that carry you into HN comments. Mechanical reactions lead to predictable and tedious threads. If you don't have anything substantive to say, not commenting is a fine choice. "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- reedjosh 5y agoI think what you've said here is great, and clearly this conversation is controversial. My own opinions on this and many other topics are almost all controversial. That said, the flagging here seems to have killed the conversion entirely. I was kinda excited to discuss the topic. Maybe it will rekindle. Idk...
- BrissyCoder 5y agoThis is exactly the reason I come here rather than Reddit. Honestly HN feels like one of the last corners of the internet where it's possible to have a rational discussion, disagree with strangers and still be civil.
- bennysomething 5y agoSame here.
- mads 5y agoIts gotten so bad, I would pay to use HN. I would say that compared to a news paper subscription for example, the mental stimulus provided by HN is far greater.
- HDMI_Cable 5y agoQuite honestly, that could work. Maybe a dollar a month simply to keep the riff-raff out and to keep the servers on.
- NalNezumi 5y agoWhen diet & nutrient comes in to discussion even level-headed people seems to get very heated and emotional. I hypothesize that it is because: 1. there seems to not be any hard scientific consensus 2. diet is very integrated to culture, and therefore saying "diet X is good/bad" is often taken as a personal/tribal attack. 3. There's always special-interest groups that *heavily* benefit from any preferential diet. (Farmer, stores, marketing group you name it) And they often do have strong influence to actually push through an agenda (see any overarching farmer subsidies/regulation in any country) The first two being a reason it get heated, and the last one being the one adding the fuel. Prefacing any dietary statement with "for me, X works..." with a story might be better than anecdata "I've heard it works.."
- chunky1994 5y agoWhile I agree with the larger sentiment, there is a rather substantial amount of diet and nutrition science with the core being quite an agreed upon set of foundational principles. If I were to summarize: 1. We derive energy from three major macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates) 2. Our body has certain macronutrients it cannot synthesize and NEEDS for healthy functioning (essential fatty acids and essential amino acids) 3. Our bodies are largely energy efficient (by which I mean the processes to produce energy are readily actionable with average hormone levels of insulin/ghrelin/leptin etc.) when consuming carbohydrates, but can turn to other nutrient sources when they are not to be found. 4. Our body composition can be manipulated by manipulating our energy expenditure either via manipulating the caloric content of food or via the preferential production of body tissue from horomonal influence (this is why muscle mass increases when using testosterone even if caloric intake is kept constant but above a certain macronutrient threshold). 5.There are a certain set of micronutrients we need on a continuous basis (the exact amounts of which are up for debate but the ranges seem to be reasonably agreed upon). 6. Our diet influences our gut fauna and this further influences how much nutritional value we get from our diet, it is quite a symbiotic cycle. 7. Barring certain specific horomonal imbalance diseases, everyone's body largely abides by the above principles, (i.e as special as everyone thinks they are, they're probably more average than not when it comes their metabolism).
- 5y ago
- armchairhacker 5y agoRegardless of this new evidence people have been eating carbs for at least 10000+ years. The obesity epidemic has only really started the past 30-50 years. Whatever has caused people to get super-fat, it wasn't carbs.
- xvilka 5y agoEasy carbs and abundance of it. Before it was hard to find too much food for a common person.
- vagrantJin 5y agoWell it's not like we don't know that eating excessive amounts of food, is going to cause health problems related to obesity or otherwise.
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoThe problem is that we have no handle on what "excessive amounts" really is. A slice of cake is, in fact, an "excessive amount" - it's more food than a pound of cheese. Eating a pound of cheese does, indeed, feel "excessive", while a slice of cake (or two) is just a chaser after a full meal for most people.
- spadros 5y agoNot sure what cake we're talking about here but a pound of cheddar has roughly 1800 calories. A slice of cake is worth about 4 or 5 thick slices of cheese if you're trying to compare calorically.
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoComparing calories is not the correct approach. Diesel fuel has a huge amount of calories, but your body obviously can't process it properly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- temporalparts 5y agoUnrelated, but I wanted to explore an idea from the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" [0]: Humans have evolved for a very long time as hunter and gatherers, and we have evolved to eat diet consistent with how we evolved, namely low carbohydrate diets. The reason why grain prevailed was because grain could support more humans per acre of land. Humans did not choose grain for long term health benefits, but rather for efficiency reasons. It seems that many health problems stem from high carbohydrate diets. Are there reasons why we shouldn't switch to a low carbohydrate diet? [0]https://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/B08PDQGPCY https://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scien...
- sammalloy 5y agoI'm currently having a love affair with a loaf of bread. Once I discovered that pan grilled fresh bread was superior to toast (because the moisture content is retained), my entire life changed. Try it, you'll never toast again.
- chihuahua 5y agoInteresting, but I'm not sure what "pan grilled fresh bread" means. I take a slice of bread, put it in a frying pan, and then what? Put it on the stove top, put it on a gas grill, put it under a broiler? Can you elaborate?
- sammalloy 5y agoInstead of using a toaster, place two pieces of bread in a hot skillet over medium heat for a few minutes for each side, brown to your liking. Add your choice of butter or oil to either the bread or the pan. This is the same process as you would use to make grilled cheese, except I'm using it to make toast. When you're done, you don't get the dry, crispy, crunchy toast result; you now have a mild toast-like browning on the outside and soft moist bread on the inside.
- fit2rule 5y agoGreat, now do Narwala Gabarnmang. 60,000 years of human teachings.