“Nearly every food item you currently eat today has been modified from it’s ancestral form, typically in a drastic way, ” he began. “The notion that we have not yet adapted to eat wheat, yet we have had sufficient time to adapt to kale or lentils is ridiculous. In fact, for most practitioners of the Paleo Diet, who are typically westerners, the majority of the food they consume has been available to their gene pool for less than five centuries. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, potatoes, avocados, pecans, cashews, and blueberries are all New World crops, and have only been on the dinner table of African and Eurasian populations for probably 10 generations of their evolutionary history. Europeans have been eating grain for the last 10,000 years; we’ve been eating sweet potatoes for less than 500. Yet the human body has seemingly adapted perfectly well to yams, let alone pineapple and sunflower seeds.”
some good or satirical points notwithstanding - don’t write paleodiet off too fast… the issue - imho - is not 10,000 yrs old wheat vs 500 yrs old yams. it’s the human gluten sensitivity that makes most sense to avoid cereals.
do you recall how people used to glue wallpaper on in the old days? with liquidy wheat flower and water mix. and that’s in short what also happens in your gut on bread/pasta/etc -reach diet.
i’ve been on virtually-gluten-free regimen for couple of years now - and mostly on paleodiet: meat, vegetables, fruits - and have never felt or trained better or weighed less in my life.
i’ve been on virtually-gluten-free regimen for couple of years now - and mostly on paleodiet: meat, vegetables, fruits - and have never felt or trained better or weighed less in my life.
How does gluten affect your weight?
It would make most sense that if we haven’t evolved to consume it that means we wouldn’t digest and absorb the calories from it or associated foods very well, hence it would affect your weight in a negative way from an evolutionary perspective where starvation or death due to malnutrition or its consequences has likely been a force throughout all of human history until quite recently.
Getting fat is a modern problem and again would seem to come from being too well adapted to a given food source such that you ring out as many calories from consuming it as possible.
For example try eating a diet of grass or nothing but raw foods if you really would like to see the consequences of a diet that humans have not evolved to consume, the consequences would be weight loss as the body couldn’t get enough calories to survive.
my personal and totally unscientific take on it is that when i eat squash, yams and similar carbo veggies - it all digests very fast leaving me light and agile, whereas after rare bread piece or other gluten stuff, even kasha and qinoa - i feel not exactly bloated, but full nonetheless for much longer. and it shows on a weight scale too when i alternate kasha and squash weeks
When asked what she would tell people who wished to pursue a true paleolithic diet, Dr. Hoyes laughed harshly before replying. ”You really want to be paleo? Then don’t buy anything from a store. Gather and kill what you need to eat. Wild grasses and tubers, acorns, gophers, crickets- They all provide a lot of nutrition. You’ll spend a lot of energy gathering the stuff, of course, and you’re going to be hungry, but that’ll help you maintain that lean physique you’re after. And hunting down the neighbor’s cats for dinner because you’ve already eaten you’re way through the local squirrel population will probably give you all the exercise you’ll ever need.”
When you think about it, the average lifespan of Paleo man was probably like 33 years old, and even up until about 150 years ago we’re talking avg lifespans in the low 30s. Our “poor” nutrition has had a huge impact on how long we live, even while some people threaten that by overdoing it.
i’ve been on virtually-gluten-free regimen for couple of years now - and mostly on paleodiet: meat, vegetables, fruits - and have never felt or trained better or weighed less in my life.
I love these statements, and I’m not saying you were but usually most of these statements can be preceded or followed up by: “I used to eat nothing but processed foods, take out and fast food then I realized my diet sucked.” Most people that make switches like that don’t have anywhere to go but up. Again YEMV.
some good or satirical points notwithstanding - don’t write paleodiet off too fast… the issue - imho - is not 10,000 yrs old wheat vs 500 yrs old yams. it’s the human gluten sensitivity that makes most sense to avoid cereals.
do you recall how people used to glue wallpaper on in the old days? with liquidy wheat flower and water mix. and that’s in short what also happens in your gut on bread/pasta/etc -reach diet.
i’ve been on virtually-gluten-free regimen for couple of years now - and mostly on paleodiet: meat, vegetables, fruits - and have never felt or trained better or weighed less in my life.
You mean you are supposed to use digestive enzymes when hanging wallpaper? Who knew?
And you must have been one huge newborn: how did your mother survive childbirth?
So disregard the evolutionary adaptation justification. What nutritional benefits do grains offer that are superior to fruits and vegetables beyond inexpensive calories? I don’t eat strict a Paleo diet by any means, but I do generally try to avoid wheat and keep grains to small, side dish portions once or twice/week.
"You want to know what the ideal human diet consists of? Everything. Humans can and will eat everything, and we are remarkably successful not in spite of this fact, but because of it. Our adaptability is the hallmark of the human species. We’re not called omnivores for nothing.”
The paleo diet works, but not because it is “Paleo” but because of a few simple adjustments.
It gets people paying attention to what they are eating. This is probably the biggest factor.
It gets people off of junk food.
“Paleo” foods are typically either high protein or high fiber. The 2 dietary ingredients that are most associated with satiety (feeling full, no longer hungry) are protein and fiber. This results in a spontaneous reduction in calories.
The evolutionary biology part is just a good way to sell the whole idea. It is a neat idea, it seems logical and it is easy to sell. However, science has shown us that humans can be healthy with a wide variety of food types. The main thing, and Paleo does this, is to make a shift from processed junk food, to real, whole foods. Not because junk foods are more fattening (calorie to calorie they are the same) but because they are high reward / low satiety foods and lead spontaneously to overeating.
When you think about it, the average lifespan of Paleo man was probably like 33 years old
Yeah, but a lot of that had to do with saber tooth tigers and diseases we now have vaccines to prevent against, not so much nutrition.
Average life span is deceptive because infant mortality (which was huge post-agriculture and certainly once people started living in cities) drags it down significantly making it sound like the average adult only lived into their 30’s or 40’s but it seems at least if you made it out of childhood that living to an old age of 60+ or so wasn’t uncommon. Nowadays we don’t have the infant mortality due to infectious disease (and compromised immune systems due to malnutrition) and we have lots of medical interventions to prolong life towards the end when chronic diseases start occurring.
The question of what it was like in the “paleo” world is more challenging. Populations didn’t increase much for 10’s of thousands of years which suggest a lot of mortality except it’s pretty clear from skeletal analysis that as far as health went paleo people were a lot more healthy than post-agricultural peoples. I’ve seen suggestions that there was lots of infanticide as people basically recognized the carrying capacity of their environments and realized if they had too many kids starvation would become more likely, others have suggested predation kept populations in check…
The paleo diet works, but not because it is “Paleo” but because of a few simple adjustments.
It gets people paying attention to what they are eating. This is probably the biggest factor.
It gets people off of junk food.
“Paleo” foods are typically either high protein or high fiber. The 2 dietary ingredients that are most associated with satiety (feeling full, no longer hungry) are protein and fiber. This results in a spontaneous reduction in calories.
The evolutionary biology part is just a good way to sell the whole idea. It is a neat idea, it seems logical and it is easy to sell. However, science has shown us that humans can be healthy with a wide variety of food types. The main thing, and Paleo does this, is to make a shift from processed junk food, to real, whole foods. Not because junk foods are more fattening (calorie to calorie they are the same) but because they are high reward / low satiety foods and lead spontaneously to overeating.