Comment by preg_match
1 day ago
A lot of this largely is not true. People think that paleothic humans ate a lot of meat - they did not. They ate very little meat, we eat the most meat we’ve ever eaten now.
And the meat they did eat was lean game meat. It was high in unsaturated fats - like our modern day oils. Not like a steak. A steak is a product of farming. It’s a new invention, <10,000 years. Prior, humans ate almost exclusively nuts, fruits and foliage.
Yes oils are “refined”, but humans have been eating unsaturated oils predominantly for almost all of our existence. The proliferation of animal fats is very, very new. Really, it’s past 100 years. Before that meat was rare, it was a delicacy, very expensive for people.
Now, high sugar is a different story. But the oil thing is complex, it’s not as a simple as oil bad animal fat good and natural. No, it’s very unnatural.
No idea where you're getting this from. The paleolithic was during an ice age full of big fatty game like sloths, mammoths, and so on. Some believe we hunted these animals to the point of extinction with a tiny population, which would imply a very high level, arguably unbelievably high, of consumption of meat. Even if we didn't hunt them to extinction we certainly did engage in relatively large scale hunting and consumption of vast quantities of them, which already largely falsifies your concept.
Meat only became more of a luxury in the agricultural age where we started squeezing more and more people into smaller and smaller regions which meant there was no longer enough to go around. So plebs got the carbs, and royalty got the protein. FWIW you can also see this in the groups that have ancient traditions dating back far into the past, like the various tribal groups in Russia, Mongolian nomads, etc. Meat, and many highly creative ways of preserving it [1], remain the majority of their diet. They probably don't date back to the paleo, but at least far back enough to falsify the claim that animal fats are even remotely novel.
[1] - https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/334150-dish-kill-kopalk...
This is just not true.
In reality we have little to no idea what the proportion of meat to non meat humans ate at the time.
More realistically, different groups of humans ate different ratios of such foods.
There were almost certainly a pretty large group of humans, for example, who were basically frugivores.
You can simply look up Wikipedia and find all the references about our limited knowledge and the high likelihood that there was no single paleo diet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic
Ultimately, humans have been opportunistic omnivores capable of eating and surviving on whatever was most easily available, which is part of why they spread so successfully across the globe.
Trying to look at our history is a silly way to determine what is a good diet for humans today when we can scientifically examine humans today and identify what foods are healthier than others for them.
It’s like instead of noticing that drinking purified water has better outcomes for human beings today, insisting that we shouldn’t live drink untreated water straight out of streams and lakes because that’s what our Paleolithic ancestors did.
On topics like this that have any chance of being politicized, don't just read Wiki - but actually look at what those numbers link to, go to them, and decide if you find them compelling. Because there will be entire sections of Wiki that are based on extremely fringe views. In other cases what is said on Wiki misrepresents what it links to.
The idea that paleolithic humans, in any significant number, may have been 'frugivores' - living off fruit, is based on a fringe book for which I was able to dig up very little other than a somewhat scathing review here, [1] concluding: "If there is any science that is influenced by our cultural background, expectations, and desires it is anthropology, and we must take care to make sure that what we want to be true doesn't obscure our vision."
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As for just 'sciencing' food, it doesn't really work because health is more holistic than basic measurables. Your example hits on one aspect of this. The motivation for 'real water' is because we've relatively recently learned that the human gut biome has a dramatic influence on our health and psychology. It even has a potential link to autism. I'm not ready to start going for 'real water' to address that but there are related issues.
For instance glyphosate was believed to be safe because it having no apparent reaction on the human body, but it turns out that (amongst other issues) it completely wrecks the human gut biome with effects that are not well understood. Yet if you look at the nutritional content or other measurables of e.g. glyphosate desiccated wheat, there's not going to be any red flags outside high levels of glyphosate. It's even a viable explanation for the odd rise of seemingly inconsistent 'gluten sensitivity'.
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Anyhow, point of that all being that we know what worked in the past, worked and worked extremely well. The dramatic rise of various issues in the present ranging from declining IQs, increasing obesity, falling testosterone levels, sharp increases in many forms of mental illness - autism not least of all, and so on - suggests that we're doing something, or more likely - some things, that are quite harmful to ourselves, but that we probably believe to be safe.
[1] - https://www.wired.com/2009/06/book-review-man-the-hunted/
IIRC you can analyze dental calculus found on teeth and detect the proportions of various protein sources in the diet of that individual, but IDK how far back in time you can do this.
Several hundred years is certainly possible, Medieval cemeteries can be analyzed like that.
(Whenever my dentist cleans my calculus, we joke that we are ruining some future archeologist's work :)
If you got out of my comment that oils and fats are bad, then you didn't understand my point. I was emphasizing on the negative effects of processed foods.
People in certain regions always ate a lot of meat. For example, the Inuit don't really have anything else to eat. Nothing edible grows that far North. And they are neither obese nor suffer from classical diseases of civilization, until they start eating highly processed modern food.
The Maasai are also known to eat a lot of meat and dairy.
I'm sure you can eat a diet fairly high in meat and dairy and be healthy, IF you are lean enough and exercise enough. However, I can pretty confidently say the Intuit did not eat nearly as much meat and dairy as modern Americans. And, the meat they did eat was not the same because it was wild, not farmed.
But, humans have been eating unsaturated fat from nuts, seeds, and meat for millennia. Unsaturated fat is not the devil. We have very strong evidence that a diet high in meat, particularly farmed red meat, is both carcinogenic and causes heart disease. When you look at high processed diets across the globe today, you'll notice they have similarities:
1. Extreme consumption of fatty, farmed meats
2. Very little fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other foods high in fiber
3. Processed shelf-stable goods
4. Extreme portion sizes
When people look at the Mediterranean diet, it's not just that they eat much more food high in unsaturated fat as opposed to saturated fat. They also eat less and move much more.
> However, I can pretty confidently say the Intuit did not eat nearly as much meat and dairy as modern Americans.
Incorrect, your points are otherwise true. Inuit diet was close to 100% animal products, way more than anyone but carnivore diet people today eat.
The Inuit don't really have any choice, nothing of nutritional value grows up there. They also prefer fat to lean meat, no surprise in conditions of the Far North. Also, during the Polar Night, they didn't move that much.
I agree that the fact that this meat and fat is wild may be the root cause of the differences between their and our health outcomes. That indicates, though, that we may have something in our forms of meat and dairy that potentially harms us - and that if we identify what, we may be able to get rid of that specific problem.