Paleo diet - real or fantasy? From Scientic American

[Irulan]

what did hunter gatherers REALLY eat?

Interesting and thoughtful.
I thought it was pretty balanced in observing the benefits of a healthy, less processed diet, while also examining the realities of what a real paleo diet might have looked like , and how healthy or not our prehistoric counterparts may have been.

[OakLeaf]

I suppose you can't have a straw man without the grain the straw was threshed from...

[salsabike]

That IS a really interesting article. Thanks.

[goldfinch]

Decent article but the problem is that a short article can never address all the issues. So, you get comments like Oak's. It is hard to say the article is battling strawmen when the diet is called paleo, and you can end up with arguments about what is the "one true paleo diet" much like arguing who is the one true Scotsman. After all, some are zealots. And some are not. But since a lot of the arguments concerning the diet are based on what people used to eat it is fair to talk about what people did in fact used to eat. Questions about adaptation to modern diets are often glossed over by the paleo proponents. Conclusions get drawn before there is evidence. Testimonials are used as if they are evidence. The paleo promoters have the burden of proof and they haven't met it for certain aspects of the diet, specifically, the prohibitions on dairy, beans and grains. Most people are not gluten intolerant, some are. If you are sensitive to gluten or have celiac disease, then don't eat wheat. If not, go ahead and eat wheat. It isn't poison. If you are lactose intolerant, treat it or avoid milk. Otherwise, show me the proof that milk products are bad. And no, the China study won't cut it.

Humans evolved tremendous dietary flexibility. Dietary variances throughout the world likely show that there isn't one diet that works for all.

[shootingstar]

I'm looking for what my ancestor, Beijing man, paleo era might have eaten.

I nearly find it hard to believe that paleo didn't include some form of meat. Not surprising that Inuit diet would have been very meat based. Even now getting fresh veggies and fruit (cheaply, locally) is a (big) problem up North. Within the last 2 years, locals are trying community greenhouse,etc. This is the 21st century. We're still evolving.

[Irulan]

The paleo diet is very much meat based. However, it's supposed to be free range,grass fed, and organic etc as that is supposed to be closer to what Paleo man ate.

[OakLeaf]

I'm looking for what my ancestor, Beijing man, paleo era might have eaten.

Well, those plants and animals don't exist any more than the contemporaneous European plants and animals do. That's the main point of the article (and the other article that made news last week, about how agriculture has bred all the nutrition out of food).

I know this is of interest to archaeologists, and from an archaeological/anthropological standpoint it is interesting, but to me, from a dietary standpoint it has no more point than arguing about whether Dr Atkins's family changed the spelling of their name when they immigrated, or whether what's-her-face really killed the Scarsdale doctor.

Much more interesting to me would be some discussion of the sustainability of a grain-free diet. It's unfortunate since my experience and, it seems, the personal experience of most everyone who's tried it, is that it feels much better to get most of your calories from vegetables, with some meat. And from an anthropological standpoint, it's undisputed that humans developed a lot of chronic illnesses at the same time they started eating grains. But the empty calories of grains are what allowed the population to explode, too. I have a feeling that there's no way the world's population could eat a reduced-grain diet, even if we all magically returned to an agrarian life. Which really does sharply accentuate the dietary differences between the haves and the have-nots. But it seems no one wants to talk about that angle.