Anthropologists et al: "Paleo-diet is not Paleo"

[gyeonghwa]

What I've been saying and what I have continued to to say, the Paleo-diet deserve a scientific side-eye. An international conference of anthropologists, archaeologists and molecular biologists in Frankfurt have expressed their collective sigh over the paleo-diet stating that its premise is wrong. They're not saying the paleo-diet isn't healthy. In fact, they acknowledge that such a diet, if taken appropriately, can be healthy. They're saying that notion that humans aren't evolved to eat agriculturally produced food is completely pseudoscience.

“You simply do not see specific, trans-regional trends in human subsistence in the archaeological record. People can live off everything from whale blubber to seeds and grasses. 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.”

Basically, it is Western presupposition on the "ideal" diet of all humans. Simply because American diets is relatively unhealthy for Americans does not preclude that agricultural food is bad for every human ever. The Mediterranean diet and the Japanese diet are vastly different in ingredients yet studies show that those diets are very healthy if taken in moderation. Likewise, it doesn't account for people who lives in harsher environment. Even in the West it doesn't account for people living in different social and geographical conditions. It is probably something upper-middle class suburbanites thought is best for humans. Really the scientists agree it is a notion that Westerners invented.

“Nearly every food item you currently eat today has been modified from its 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.”

It also rely on a misunderstanding of evolution; Agriculture can't be maladaptive if it doesn't affect the reproduction potential of the population as a whole. The paleo-diet relies on the assumption that evolution happens on an individual level. In fact agricultural has been evolutionary favorable because of population booms that occurs from it. One of the scientists laments that it's really a bunch of folks who have no understanding of human evolution.

“It’s like, even my barber is suddenly an expert in evolutionary physiology. A seventeen-year-old kid at my gym give me a ten minute lecture on how my Clif Bar was poison because humans can’t metabolize soy. I’ve been studying human evolution for thirty years.”

[Ironchew]

The fact that lactose-intolerance is still the default tendency in almost all human populations kinda flies in the face of humans being adapted to eat everything.

I'm obese, and the only way I know of to lose weight without starving myself is to stay away from grains. Not a "paleo-diet", but I know I'm not adapted to eat grains when they're in plentiful supply.

EDIT: We still have a premodern understanding of nutrition and virtually no understanding of the underlying mechanisms of obesity, so I take all of these nutritional studies with a huge grain of salt.

[SpaceProg]

I think back in the era of early man, what was eaten was basically:

1.  What tasted decent enough to not want to spit out immediately.
2.  What, upon ingesting, didn't make said primitive human all dead, as that would have been counterproductive.
3.  What, upon preparing food to ingest, didn't maul, bite, sting, poison, and/or make primitive human dead.

[Old Viking]

Well I'm grateful that we've been around long enough to thrive on hot dogs.

[RavynousHunter]

The Food Hipsters are a bunch of idiotic rich kids?  Say it ain't so!

[Shane for Wax]

It's a confirmed fact that the human jaw and teeth are designed specifically for an omnivorous diet including agriculturally grown food. The only problem is in the fact that agriculture has grown faster than humans have had time to entirely adapt.

It just seems like more nonsense in the vein of ultra-vegan.