7 ms·

A diet that draws from the ancient past

brandonmenc 5y ago
> We humans may be essentially biologically the same—with the same nutritional needs—as we were 300,000 years ago, but we are living in the 21st century. Off by at least an order of magnitude, possibly two - lactose tolerance developed a few thousand years ago at the latest. Even if you could know what cavemen ate, there's little guarantee it would be "optimal" (whatever that means) or even healthy. Humans change faster than we think.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  And evolved creatures are incomplete machines. We didn't just evolve to a diet from 300,000 or 30,000 or 3,000 years ago. We accumulated adaptations suited to all of those diets -- and genetic drift that made us unsuited to anything else -- and then our diet shifted and we began adapting to new foodstuffs instead. There's no factory default diet for us to reset to. It was always a moving target.
  - deegles 5y ago
    > we began adapting to new foodstuffs This would only be true if groups of people who eat certain foods reproduce less than other groups. Otherwise you're thinking of Lamarckism[0]. With modern medicine, people can eat suboptimal diets their whole lives... [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
    - saalweachter 5y ago
      Of course how well an animal digests the food it is eating affects its survival and the survival of its offspring? If your tribe of anatomically modern homo sapiens sapiens moves to the sea shore for a thousand years because environmental changes have made your previous lifestyle impossible, mutations that correlate with shelf fish allergies are going to be highly disadvantageous, for instance. If wheat farming is all the rage, anyone who can digest gluten is going to have way more offspring than anyone who can't.
- dividedbyzero 5y ago
  These "caveman" diet fads are really weird. Lets say hunter-gatherers instead, that describes our collective deep past much better. Their respective diets are super varied and diverse, from almost exclusively meat in arctic climates to a wild mix of hundreds of species from different biomes in the Kalahari to basically pescatarian in some very maritime places. Then there's lifestyle – nutritional needs will vary greatly according to whether one routinely walks 20km a day, lives in the cold, or stares at a screen in airconditioned offices, and it's not just about calories, sometimes it's probably even a genetic thing – there seem to have been adaptations to an almost exclusively carnivorous diet. Replicating their diet wouldn't be great for most people. And on top of all that there's the ten-ish millennia of adaptation to agriculture and raising livestock that you mentioned. I don't think there is much to it save for some very general insights into how diets and the environment interact.
  - alphanumeric0 5y ago
    Why wouldn't replicating hunter-gatherer diets be great for most people?
    - inawarminister 5y ago
      Indeed. Eat many plants, fruits, berries, and all the organs of animals (skip brains if you're afraid of CZD). Avoid wheat and cereals that much. Seems beer was a-okay though? Modern hunter gatherers do walk/jog for 7 to 9 hours a day, so... (At 3kph with occasional sprinting. Seems to be what our gait is optimised for to avoid injuries) [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004724840190541X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    In any case, I for one (biology/psychology might differ) is infinitely better when on a restricted diet with very active day. Everything falls into place naturally. I agree with not falling for shallow fads, but there's something to basic "natural" lifestyles.
hankchinaski 5y ago
on the other side of the spectrum there is the advent of lab-grown/synthetic meat https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/14/1018296/bill-gates-climate-change-beef-trees-microsoft/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/14/1018296/bill-gat...
helpfulmandrill 5y ago
More paleo-carnivore rubbish?
- npsimons 5y ago
  > More paleo-carnivore rubbish? Probably. It always amuses me that people automatically associate "paleo" with "eating mammoths every day", when a simple glance to other primates shows a heavily plant-based diet, on top of which, how many mammoths do they think our ancient ancestors were killing? Even well into the 20th century, meat was not an everyday food, and it's completely unnecessary (some argue harmful) to the human diet. Books like "How Not to Die" opened my eyes.
  - zamalek 5y ago
    > Even well into the 20th century, meat was not an everyday food Centuries always sound so long, just to make your point very clear: there are living humans who ate meat as a treat during childhood. That's basically the approach my wife and I are taking: 95% plant-based. We have meat maybe twice a month (as a treat). Not only do we feel healthier, it's also so cheap.
    - npsimons 5y ago
      > Not only do we feel healthier, it's also so cheap. Better for the environment too.
  - alphanumeric0 5y ago
    If you read the article the man went several days without meat in the tundra. I'd imagine there are very few plants to gather in the winter.
- kubb 5y ago
  Looks like it, but it's dressed up in so much filler that it's hard to tell. Probably targeting the insecure modern man.
- helpfulmandrill 5y ago
pgt 5y ago
Unfortunately this is only an excerpt from a longer article and does not offer any answers about what the diet of the ancient past was, or what the diet of the future should be.
- hourislate 5y ago
  >what the diet of the ancient past was, or what the diet of the future should be. I suppose it would have a lot to do with where your ancestors lived geographically. Dairy, Meat, Vegetables, Grains. The healthiest approach to consuming food is trying to keep it as simple as possible. The more we process it the unhealthier it is, although fermentation is an exception.
  - pempem 5y ago
    Fermentation, salted preservation, and spice. Each culture has an older understanding of how to use food as medicine. It is where modern medicine finds its own roots.
- allforJesse 5y ago
  Very frustrating. Not sure I even agree with the premise, but worse, this turns out to be just a nice story with no detail.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  A fun read though. I think it resonated with men because I have lately already been thinking about my own diet and eating habits. Edit: after googling, no doubt this is marketing for a new book: https://eatlikeahuman.com https://eatlikeahuman.com
mmcdermott 5y ago
This article shows some of the hallmarks of modern writing that simply irk me. The article begins with a long personal anecdote that has only the most tangential of connections to the premise. You could slice away about half the article and lack nothing. Not entertainment, not information - nothing. It also raises questions related to the author's new book, but gives very little information. It is an extended ad.
- fnord77 5y ago
  the internet has given narcissists an unfiltered voice. in print publications, at least content has to go through an editor (usually)
  - VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
    It’s perplexing to me, to be honest, considering how streamlined the whole internet has become. Social media is full of narcissistic behavior, but even niche one-off hobby websites are full of it, too.
catchmeifyoucan 5y ago
The build up here just took too long, and it was frustrating because we never even jump into the diet
armchairhacker 5y ago
tl;dr "food is fuel"
LegitShady 5y ago
Humans lived for like 1/3 the time in the ancient past. Its not clear to me that the diet of primitive people ended up with is somehow an optimal diet so much as a diet of circumstances. Anyways any diet that doesn't let me eat eggs rolls is obviously wrong.
- ponzao 5y ago
  I guess you are talking about life expectancy being way lower back in the day. Those numbers are massively skewed by infant mortality and so many other things (infections, complications during child birth, ...) that are nowadays easily sorted out by antibiotics and other means.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    There is literally no reason to believe that what people are in the areas they lived in with the technology they had was somehow better for a person than regular food today. It pretends that everyone are the same food and that the food was somehow optimal rather than just what was available. Its a bunk premise.
    - inawarminister 5y ago
      What regular food today? The processed food from hypercapitalism that led to obesity to 40% of the population? But I broadly agree with you. Food, exercise, and luck in avoiding sickness. It was true throughout human prehistory and today as well.
      - LegitShady 5y ago
        What led to obesity is not the food per se but the wide availability of it and the change in other norms like exercise and outdoor play which changes lifelong habits. Even with a world of processed food it's rare to see a fat person who is a daily runner and that is no accident. But this theory that humans used to eat an optimal diet and now don't assumes that humans in the past were somehow in more control of their diets than we are today and I don't think that's true at all.

> We humans may be essentially biologically the same—with the same nutritional needs—as we were 300,000 years ago, but we are living in the 21st century. Off by at least an order of magnitude, possibly two - lactose tolerance developed a few thousand years ago at the latest. Even if you could know what cavemen ate, there's little guarantee it would be "optimal" (whatever that means) or even healthy. Humans change faster than we think.

saalweachter 5y ago
And evolved creatures are incomplete machines. We didn't just evolve to a diet from 300,000 or 30,000 or 3,000 years ago. We accumulated adaptations suited to all of those diets -- and genetic drift that made us unsuited to anything else -- and then our diet shifted and we began adapting to new foodstuffs instead. There's no factory default diet for us to reset to. It was always a moving target.
- deegles 5y ago
  > we began adapting to new foodstuffs This would only be true if groups of people who eat certain foods reproduce less than other groups. Otherwise you're thinking of Lamarckism[0]. With modern medicine, people can eat suboptimal diets their whole lives... [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    Of course how well an animal digests the food it is eating affects its survival and the survival of its offspring? If your tribe of anatomically modern homo sapiens sapiens moves to the sea shore for a thousand years because environmental changes have made your previous lifestyle impossible, mutations that correlate with shelf fish allergies are going to be highly disadvantageous, for instance. If wheat farming is all the rage, anyone who can digest gluten is going to have way more offspring than anyone who can't.
dividedbyzero 5y ago
These "caveman" diet fads are really weird. Lets say hunter-gatherers instead, that describes our collective deep past much better. Their respective diets are super varied and diverse, from almost exclusively meat in arctic climates to a wild mix of hundreds of species from different biomes in the Kalahari to basically pescatarian in some very maritime places. Then there's lifestyle – nutritional needs will vary greatly according to whether one routinely walks 20km a day, lives in the cold, or stares at a screen in airconditioned offices, and it's not just about calories, sometimes it's probably even a genetic thing – there seem to have been adaptations to an almost exclusively carnivorous diet. Replicating their diet wouldn't be great for most people. And on top of all that there's the ten-ish millennia of adaptation to agriculture and raising livestock that you mentioned. I don't think there is much to it save for some very general insights into how diets and the environment interact.
- alphanumeric0 5y ago
  Why wouldn't replicating hunter-gatherer diets be great for most people?
  - inawarminister 5y ago
    Indeed. Eat many plants, fruits, berries, and all the organs of animals (skip brains if you're afraid of CZD). Avoid wheat and cereals that much. Seems beer was a-okay though? Modern hunter gatherers do walk/jog for 7 to 9 hours a day, so... (At 3kph with occasional sprinting. Seems to be what our gait is optimised for to avoid injuries) [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004724840190541X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
- agumonkey 5y ago
  In any case, I for one (biology/psychology might differ) is infinitely better when on a restricted diet with very active day. Everything falls into place naturally. I agree with not falling for shallow fads, but there's something to basic "natural" lifestyles.

hankchinaski 5y ago

on the other side of the spectrum there is the advent of lab-grown/synthetic meat https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/14/1018296/bill-gates-climate-change-beef-trees-microsoft/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/14/1018296/bill-gat...

helpfulmandrill 5y ago

More paleo-carnivore rubbish?

npsimons 5y ago
> More paleo-carnivore rubbish? Probably. It always amuses me that people automatically associate "paleo" with "eating mammoths every day", when a simple glance to other primates shows a heavily plant-based diet, on top of which, how many mammoths do they think our ancient ancestors were killing? Even well into the 20th century, meat was not an everyday food, and it's completely unnecessary (some argue harmful) to the human diet. Books like "How Not to Die" opened my eyes.
- zamalek 5y ago
  > Even well into the 20th century, meat was not an everyday food Centuries always sound so long, just to make your point very clear: there are living humans who ate meat as a treat during childhood. That's basically the approach my wife and I are taking: 95% plant-based. We have meat maybe twice a month (as a treat). Not only do we feel healthier, it's also so cheap.
  - npsimons 5y ago
    > Not only do we feel healthier, it's also so cheap. Better for the environment too.
- alphanumeric0 5y ago
  If you read the article the man went several days without meat in the tundra. I'd imagine there are very few plants to gather in the winter.
kubb 5y ago
Looks like it, but it's dressed up in so much filler that it's hard to tell. Probably targeting the insecure modern man.
helpfulmandrill 5y ago

pgt 5y ago

Unfortunately this is only an excerpt from a longer article and does not offer any answers about what the diet of the ancient past was, or what the diet of the future should be.

hourislate 5y ago
>what the diet of the ancient past was, or what the diet of the future should be. I suppose it would have a lot to do with where your ancestors lived geographically. Dairy, Meat, Vegetables, Grains. The healthiest approach to consuming food is trying to keep it as simple as possible. The more we process it the unhealthier it is, although fermentation is an exception.
- pempem 5y ago
  Fermentation, salted preservation, and spice. Each culture has an older understanding of how to use food as medicine. It is where modern medicine finds its own roots.
allforJesse 5y ago
Very frustrating. Not sure I even agree with the premise, but worse, this turns out to be just a nice story with no detail.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
A fun read though. I think it resonated with men because I have lately already been thinking about my own diet and eating habits. Edit: after googling, no doubt this is marketing for a new book: https://eatlikeahuman.com https://eatlikeahuman.com

mmcdermott 5y ago

This article shows some of the hallmarks of modern writing that simply irk me. The article begins with a long personal anecdote that has only the most tangential of connections to the premise. You could slice away about half the article and lack nothing. Not entertainment, not information - nothing. It also raises questions related to the author's new book, but gives very little information. It is an extended ad.

fnord77 5y ago
the internet has given narcissists an unfiltered voice. in print publications, at least content has to go through an editor (usually)
- VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
  It’s perplexing to me, to be honest, considering how streamlined the whole internet has become. Social media is full of narcissistic behavior, but even niche one-off hobby websites are full of it, too.

catchmeifyoucan 5y ago

The build up here just took too long, and it was frustrating because we never even jump into the diet

armchairhacker 5y ago

tl;dr "food is fuel"

LegitShady 5y ago

Humans lived for like 1/3 the time in the ancient past. Its not clear to me that the diet of primitive people ended up with is somehow an optimal diet so much as a diet of circumstances. Anyways any diet that doesn't let me eat eggs rolls is obviously wrong.

ponzao 5y ago
I guess you are talking about life expectancy being way lower back in the day. Those numbers are massively skewed by infant mortality and so many other things (infections, complications during child birth, ...) that are nowadays easily sorted out by antibiotics and other means.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  There is literally no reason to believe that what people are in the areas they lived in with the technology they had was somehow better for a person than regular food today. It pretends that everyone are the same food and that the food was somehow optimal rather than just what was available. Its a bunk premise.
  - inawarminister 5y ago
    What regular food today? The processed food from hypercapitalism that led to obesity to 40% of the population? But I broadly agree with you. Food, exercise, and luck in avoiding sickness. It was true throughout human prehistory and today as well.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      What led to obesity is not the food per se but the wide availability of it and the change in other norms like exercise and outdoor play which changes lifelong habits. Even with a world of processed food it's rare to see a fat person who is a daily runner and that is no accident. But this theory that humans used to eat an optimal diet and now don't assumes that humans in the past were somehow in more control of their diets than we are today and I don't think that's true at all.