8 ms·

Roman Gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank a tonic of ashes

53 points by diodorus 12y ago

JamesSwift 12y ago
I'm always fascinated by the 'correctness' [1] of medicinal treatments in ancient times. Here, the paper explains that the ash tonic effectively served as a mineral supplement to promote bone healing. Is it just coincidence that they medicated in this manner, and it ended up being beneficial? Did they somehow know that the tonic was effective for these means? If so, how? Or is this just me weighting the 'correct' choice of remedies higher than the likely multitude of faulty choices that were made in those times? [1] Poor choice of word, but can't think of a better one
- krivx 12y ago
  A surprisingly huge amount of modern science is formalising and quantifying existing knowledge. I would say that they either discovered this by chance or adopted it from another group that made the discovery - they had access to a very wide range of folk remedies from across the Roman empire. They may have had no insight into how or why this worked other than drinking ash tonics makes you feel better than not drinking them.
- jeremyt 12y ago
  Efficacy
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- benbreen 12y ago
  I'm a medical historian and I think about this all the time - it's a more complex question than it initially appears to be. The typical line of reasoning is to assume that medical treatments "progress" through history as the efficacious ones win adherents and the ones that don't work fall out of favor. The problem with this is that the most popular medical treatment in the European and Islamic world for 2,000 years (bleeding) was medically worthless (well, unless you happen to have very high blood pressure). So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people (people like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle accepted bleeding as a treatment, so clearly "they weren't smart" or "they didn't understand the scientific method" isn't a good explanation). I think the answer is two pronged. One is simply that the placebo effect is extremely powerful, so even cures that we consider not to be efficacious in a clinical setting still "worked" in daily practice as placebos. The second is to look more closely at what someone with the scientific mind of Robert Boyle made of bleeding. He actually did do quasi-experimental trials involving blood loss and concluded that "excessive" bleeding was bad for human health. By the same token, he started doing chemical assays of various mineral and animal-based cures (like eating burnt lizards for epilepsy, and things like that) and began to lay the foundations for our later (18th/19th century) understanding of which minerals and vitamins are essential for human health. It's entirely possible that Greco-Roman doctors were doing similar things, but Boyle had the benefit of the ready dissemination of his findings via print and the world's first scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions), which happened to be edited by his close associate (Henry Oldenberg). In short I think there was a kind of practical empiricism at work in the history of medicine that has always existed. But that it didn't begin to coalesce into clinical effective treatments until print culture made it possible for people to share their findings on a global level. This wasn't a simple march out of ignorance toward truth, though. And the reason for this is that the placebo effect of remedies like bleeding often "worked" just as well as the partially-effective treatments of premodern times, like, for instance, supplementing poor diets by eating the ashes of various animal and plant products.
  - pyre 12y ago
    > So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people You also have to accept that even extremely intelligent people view evidence through the lens of their preconceptions. This can be a difficult thing to escape.
    - wavegeek 12y ago
      I just read in "the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers" written ca 300 AD that Pythagoras (yes that Pythagoras) was the inventor of the "meat for athletes" diet. He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator. Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
      - maximumoverload 12y ago
        >He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing I heard that's mostly a myth edit: there was apparently different Pythagoras, who was a boxer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer)
      - pyre 12y ago
        This post seems unrelated to my comment. Did you mean to respond to a different comment? > He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator. If you are attempting to respond directly to my comment, then I don't see how being an athlete himself (even though that fact seems debatable) somehow means that his ideas aren't coloured in some way by his preconceptions. This has nothing to do with being in an 'ivory tower,' but instead to do with mapping the evidence to pre-conceived ideas and then calling it a day without questioning those idea themselves. > Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury. It was an expensive luxury. I don't think that anyone is debating this. Even in China you can map the increase in consumption of meat to the rise of the Chinese middle-class in recent years.
  - Jun8 12y ago
    David Deutsch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch) has an interesting take on explaining why intelligent people in history did not converge on the correct theories sooner (not just in medicine, e.g. in physics, so noise created by placebo effect does not explain those), namely that if you have what he terms a bad theory empiricism or intelligence will not let you iterate to the correct solution as most people assume. You can be stuck at a local minimum. If you have 15mins, watch his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_....
- Detrus 12y ago
  Athletes tend to stick to the same ritualized routine for months and years, which minimizes variables and helps them figure out which remedy really works.
- Sone7 12y ago
  My guess is that there is a capacity for instinct that leads some people to find the correct remedy for themselves. The way people with mineral deficiency might crave soil, could be similar to the way shamans in South America 'knew' to combine an MAOI found in one variety of tree bark with the DMT containing plant - out of tens of thousands of plant species. I know from my own experience that foods I hated as a kid turned out to be pretty bad for me - cauliflower, peanut butter, white bread, tomatoes - have real negative effects for one reason or another. On the other side, foods that I've craved at certain times like oranges or almonds, were counteracting a deficiency of one thing or another. Of course, once this works once, the person who it worked for would spread the word for others with a similar problem.
- zaroth 12y ago
  I was reading about Romans and lead poisoning on HN a couple weeks ago. I think this is just one case where it didn't happen to work out disastrously, but in many other cases the remedy was much worse than the disease.
smilliken 12y ago
Ephesus, where the bones are from, is a remarkable city: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesos http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesos Much of the stone architecture ruins still stand, including an ampitheater, library, bathhouses, and much more.
bane 12y ago
"The result shows that gladiators mostly ate a vegetarian diet. There is virtually no difference in terms of nutrition from the local "normal population." Meals consisted primarily of grain and meat-free meals. The word "barley eater" relates in this case to the fact that gladiators were probably given grain of an inferior quality." 1) You don't waste expensive food on people who are about to die stabbing each other to death for your entertainment. 2) You don't even bother to waste good grain on them. 3) Most people ate a mostly vegetarian diet, meat is expensive and hard to transport.
- qwerta 12y ago
  > You don't waste expensive food on people who are about to die stabbing each other to death for your entertainment. you have no idea. Gladiators were something like sport celebrities.
  - pyre 12y ago
    While this is true, it was a blood-sport. When a soccer player loses a match, he/she can go on to win later. If you lose a duel to the death, you're dead.
    - rational-future 12y ago
      Not true, very small percentage of the fights ended with death.
      - omegaham 12y ago
        And most of those were convicts getting executed. Get the people warmed up by killing some nameless criminals, and then send in the stars.
    - kmm 12y ago
      Duels to the death were rather rare[1] during the Imperial Era. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Combat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Combat
hoodoof 12y ago
Eating burnt food is a risk factor in intestinal cancer. Those gladiators should look out for their health.
dghughes 12y ago
> mostly ate a vegetarian diet. There is virtually no difference in terms of nutrition from the local "normal population." I would consider that to be a normal diet, even today I know I don't each meat everyday. My mother told me her family on the farm in the 1950s only had meat once per week at the Sunday dinner, sometimes not. This was normal for this region people were not called vegetarians it was just a normal diet; meat was expensive and hard to store. >drank ashes after training as a tonic. I wonder if it was an ancient belief of gaining the power of the item you were consuming in this case a volcano similar to eating tiger or bear would give you their strength.
- sunshinerag 12y ago
  The ashes simply are a rich mineral source.
- elorant 12y ago
  I wonder if it was an ancient belief of gaining the power of the item you were consuming in this case a volcano similar to eating tiger or bear would give you their strength. It has nothing to do with that. In Greece where I live, in the past ashes were used to filter water. Even today it’s used in pastries as in bakery because it helps in digestion and cleans the bowel from infections. It has dozens of other uses, from cleaning dishes and pottery to fertilizer (that’s why some of the best wines are produced in places where used to be volcanoes). It can also drive insects like ants and roaches away, can be used in soaps, on open wounds to help disinfection, etc.
  - brimstedt 12y ago
    Also, ashes are basic (? I mean Non asidic) which is good for you.
    - thrownaway2424 12y ago
      So is drano.
    - eropple 12y ago
steveplace 12y ago
> The vegetarian diet had nothing to do with poverty or animal rights. Gladiators, it seems, were fat. Consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley, and legumes, like beans, was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds. "Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat," Grossschmidt explains. "A fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight." Not only would a lean gladiator have been dead meat, he would have made for a bad show. Surface wounds "look more spectacular," says Grossschmidt. "If I get wounded but just in the fatty layer, I can fight on," he adds. "It doesn't hurt much, and it looks great for the spectators." Source: http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html So yeah if I want to have a higher body fat percentage, I guess I could do this.
- gohrt 12y ago
  Does this prove that bodyfat is from carbs, not fat?
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
A vegetarian diet and eating of ashes is quite common today in southern India. The ashes are eaten as part of religious ceremonies.

53 points by diodorus 12y ago

I'm always fascinated by the 'correctness' [1] of medicinal treatments in ancient times. Here, the paper explains that the ash tonic effectively served as a mineral supplement to promote bone healing. Is it just coincidence that they medicated in this manner, and it ended up being beneficial? Did they somehow know that the tonic was effective for these means? If so, how? Or is this just me weighting the 'correct' choice of remedies higher than the likely multitude of faulty choices that were made in those times? [1] Poor choice of word, but can't think of a better one

krivx 12y ago
A surprisingly huge amount of modern science is formalising and quantifying existing knowledge. I would say that they either discovered this by chance or adopted it from another group that made the discovery - they had access to a very wide range of folk remedies from across the Roman empire. They may have had no insight into how or why this worked other than drinking ash tonics makes you feel better than not drinking them.
jeremyt 12y ago
Efficacy
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
benbreen 12y ago
I'm a medical historian and I think about this all the time - it's a more complex question than it initially appears to be. The typical line of reasoning is to assume that medical treatments "progress" through history as the efficacious ones win adherents and the ones that don't work fall out of favor. The problem with this is that the most popular medical treatment in the European and Islamic world for 2,000 years (bleeding) was medically worthless (well, unless you happen to have very high blood pressure). So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people (people like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle accepted bleeding as a treatment, so clearly "they weren't smart" or "they didn't understand the scientific method" isn't a good explanation). I think the answer is two pronged. One is simply that the placebo effect is extremely powerful, so even cures that we consider not to be efficacious in a clinical setting still "worked" in daily practice as placebos. The second is to look more closely at what someone with the scientific mind of Robert Boyle made of bleeding. He actually did do quasi-experimental trials involving blood loss and concluded that "excessive" bleeding was bad for human health. By the same token, he started doing chemical assays of various mineral and animal-based cures (like eating burnt lizards for epilepsy, and things like that) and began to lay the foundations for our later (18th/19th century) understanding of which minerals and vitamins are essential for human health. It's entirely possible that Greco-Roman doctors were doing similar things, but Boyle had the benefit of the ready dissemination of his findings via print and the world's first scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions), which happened to be edited by his close associate (Henry Oldenberg). In short I think there was a kind of practical empiricism at work in the history of medicine that has always existed. But that it didn't begin to coalesce into clinical effective treatments until print culture made it possible for people to share their findings on a global level. This wasn't a simple march out of ignorance toward truth, though. And the reason for this is that the placebo effect of remedies like bleeding often "worked" just as well as the partially-effective treatments of premodern times, like, for instance, supplementing poor diets by eating the ashes of various animal and plant products.
- pyre 12y ago
  > So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people You also have to accept that even extremely intelligent people view evidence through the lens of their preconceptions. This can be a difficult thing to escape.
  - wavegeek 12y ago
    I just read in "the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers" written ca 300 AD that Pythagoras (yes that Pythagoras) was the inventor of the "meat for athletes" diet. He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator. Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
    - maximumoverload 12y ago
      >He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing I heard that's mostly a myth edit: there was apparently different Pythagoras, who was a boxer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer)
    - pyre 12y ago
      This post seems unrelated to my comment. Did you mean to respond to a different comment? > He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator. If you are attempting to respond directly to my comment, then I don't see how being an athlete himself (even though that fact seems debatable) somehow means that his ideas aren't coloured in some way by his preconceptions. This has nothing to do with being in an 'ivory tower,' but instead to do with mapping the evidence to pre-conceived ideas and then calling it a day without questioning those idea themselves. > Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury. It was an expensive luxury. I don't think that anyone is debating this. Even in China you can map the increase in consumption of meat to the rise of the Chinese middle-class in recent years.
- Jun8 12y ago
  David Deutsch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch) has an interesting take on explaining why intelligent people in history did not converge on the correct theories sooner (not just in medicine, e.g. in physics, so noise created by placebo effect does not explain those), namely that if you have what he terms a bad theory empiricism or intelligence will not let you iterate to the correct solution as most people assume. You can be stuck at a local minimum. If you have 15mins, watch his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_....
Detrus 12y ago
Athletes tend to stick to the same ritualized routine for months and years, which minimizes variables and helps them figure out which remedy really works.
Sone7 12y ago
My guess is that there is a capacity for instinct that leads some people to find the correct remedy for themselves. The way people with mineral deficiency might crave soil, could be similar to the way shamans in South America 'knew' to combine an MAOI found in one variety of tree bark with the DMT containing plant - out of tens of thousands of plant species. I know from my own experience that foods I hated as a kid turned out to be pretty bad for me - cauliflower, peanut butter, white bread, tomatoes - have real negative effects for one reason or another. On the other side, foods that I've craved at certain times like oranges or almonds, were counteracting a deficiency of one thing or another. Of course, once this works once, the person who it worked for would spread the word for others with a similar problem.
zaroth 12y ago
I was reading about Romans and lead poisoning on HN a couple weeks ago. I think this is just one case where it didn't happen to work out disastrously, but in many other cases the remedy was much worse than the disease.

smilliken 12y ago

Ephesus, where the bones are from, is a remarkable city: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesos http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesos Much of the stone architecture ruins still stand, including an ampitheater, library, bathhouses, and much more.

bane 12y ago

"The result shows that gladiators mostly ate a vegetarian diet. There is virtually no difference in terms of nutrition from the local "normal population." Meals consisted primarily of grain and meat-free meals. The word "barley eater" relates in this case to the fact that gladiators were probably given grain of an inferior quality." 1) You don't waste expensive food on people who are about to die stabbing each other to death for your entertainment. 2) You don't even bother to waste good grain on them. 3) Most people ate a mostly vegetarian diet, meat is expensive and hard to transport.

qwerta 12y ago
> You don't waste expensive food on people who are about to die stabbing each other to death for your entertainment. you have no idea. Gladiators were something like sport celebrities.
- pyre 12y ago
  While this is true, it was a blood-sport. When a soccer player loses a match, he/she can go on to win later. If you lose a duel to the death, you're dead.
  - rational-future 12y ago
    Not true, very small percentage of the fights ended with death.
    - omegaham 12y ago
      And most of those were convicts getting executed. Get the people warmed up by killing some nameless criminals, and then send in the stars.
  - kmm 12y ago
    Duels to the death were rather rare[1] during the Imperial Era. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Combat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Combat

hoodoof 12y ago

Eating burnt food is a risk factor in intestinal cancer. Those gladiators should look out for their health.

dghughes 12y ago

> mostly ate a vegetarian diet. There is virtually no difference in terms of nutrition from the local "normal population." I would consider that to be a normal diet, even today I know I don't each meat everyday. My mother told me her family on the farm in the 1950s only had meat once per week at the Sunday dinner, sometimes not. This was normal for this region people were not called vegetarians it was just a normal diet; meat was expensive and hard to store. >drank ashes after training as a tonic. I wonder if it was an ancient belief of gaining the power of the item you were consuming in this case a volcano similar to eating tiger or bear would give you their strength.

sunshinerag 12y ago
The ashes simply are a rich mineral source.
elorant 12y ago
I wonder if it was an ancient belief of gaining the power of the item you were consuming in this case a volcano similar to eating tiger or bear would give you their strength. It has nothing to do with that. In Greece where I live, in the past ashes were used to filter water. Even today it’s used in pastries as in bakery because it helps in digestion and cleans the bowel from infections. It has dozens of other uses, from cleaning dishes and pottery to fertilizer (that’s why some of the best wines are produced in places where used to be volcanoes). It can also drive insects like ants and roaches away, can be used in soaps, on open wounds to help disinfection, etc.
- brimstedt 12y ago
  Also, ashes are basic (? I mean Non asidic) which is good for you.
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    So is drano.
  - eropple 12y ago

steveplace 12y ago

> The vegetarian diet had nothing to do with poverty or animal rights. Gladiators, it seems, were fat. Consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley, and legumes, like beans, was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds. "Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat," Grossschmidt explains. "A fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight." Not only would a lean gladiator have been dead meat, he would have made for a bad show. Surface wounds "look more spectacular," says Grossschmidt. "If I get wounded but just in the fatty layer, I can fight on," he adds. "It doesn't hurt much, and it looks great for the spectators." Source: http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html So yeah if I want to have a higher body fat percentage, I guess I could do this.

gohrt 12y ago
Does this prove that bodyfat is from carbs, not fat?

IndianAstronaut 12y ago

A vegetarian diet and eating of ashes is quite common today in southern India. The ashes are eaten as part of religious ceremonies.