Paleolithic Diet

[boofhead]

I find this idea very interesting. That we should eat what our bodies evolved to eat for the best health. This guy explains it very well:

http://www.earth360.com/diet_paleodiet_balzer.html

Here is the basic principle

Eat none of the following:

· Grains- including bread, pasta, noodles

· Beans- including string beans, kidney beans, lentils, peanuts, snow-peas and peas

· Potatoes

· Dairy products

· Sugar

· Salt

Eat the following:

· Meat, chicken and fish

· Eggs

· Fruit

· Vegetables (especially root vegetables, but definitely not including potatoes or sweet potatoes)

· Nuts, eg. walnuts, brazil nuts, macadamia, almond. Do not eat peanuts (a bean) or cashews (a family of their own)

· Berries- strawberries, blueberries, raspberries etc.

Try to increase your intake of:

· Root vegetables- carrots, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, Swedes

· Organ meats- liver and kidneys (I accept that many people find these unpalatable and won’t eat them)

*The logic of this article has had some effect on me, and I'm going to research this matter further.

Here are a heap more links to similar dietary theories:

http://www.paleodiet.com/

With the Western world becoming more and more obese, I think approaches like these are not to be ignored.

*Just posted this in case anyone is interested

[Medicus]

· Grains- including bread, pasta, noodles

· Beans- including string beans, kidney beans, lentils, peanuts, snow-peas and peas

· Potatoes

· Dairy products

· Sugar

· Salt

I foresee the collapse of Western Civilisation.

[Chaigidel]

I always knew pythagoras was right about those damnable beans!

[NaptownKnight]

Are Eggs not Dairy products? Seems interesting enough though. If anything we should eat a lot less of the foods that are the no nos of this diet.

[Dayman]

Are Eggs not Dairy products?.

Do cows/buffalo/goats/etc lay eggs?

[rathelios]

I see a flaw in this argument. How long did the average paleolithic human live? 25/30 years?
Besides, eggs are disgusting. Ever thought about what part of a chicken eggs come out of?

[boofhead]

I see a flaw in this argument. How long did the average paleolithic human live? 25/30 years?

That was not due to dietary causes.

Besides, eggs are disgusting. Ever thought about what part of a chicken eggs come out of?

I love them. Not raw, though. Ever thought of where all meat comes from?

[Exarch]

Besides, eggs are disgusting. Ever thought about what part of a chicken eggs come out of?

enjoy cake? i guarantee eggs wqre involved
what i do find disgusting is the phillipine balut (spelling?) chicken embryo.

@topic, yummy!!!
dont forget sometimes during times of scarcity, they woulda eaten a happy human from an enemy band

[Simetrical]

Besides, eggs are disgusting. Ever thought about what part of a chicken eggs come out of?

Hmm, and what part of a woman do people come out of? Or, for that matter, cows or other edible creatures . . . I guess if you're squeamish you'd better be a vegan hermit.

[rathelios]

A joke. I'm thinking hence Exarch's reference to cake?

and what part of a woman do people come out of?

Now I come to think of it I don't actually eat people...

[Rhinosaur]

I wonder why potatoes would be left out and other root vegetables included?

[Dayman]

I wonder why potatoes would be left out and other root vegetables included?

I'm assuming this is a paleolithic European's diet.

[boofhead]

I wonder why potatoes would be left out and other root vegetables included?

Mainly the root veges that are toxic when consumed raw are left out, as even when cooked some toxins remain.

Grains, Beans and Potatoes (GBP) share the following important characteristics:

· They are all toxic when raw- there is no doubt about this- it is a fact that no competent source would dispute- they can be extremely dangerous and it is important never to eat them raw or undercooked. These toxins include enzyme blockers, lectins and other types. I will talk about them in detail later as they are very important.

· Cooking destroys most but not all of the toxins. Insufficient cooking can lead to sickness such as acute gastroenteritis.

· They are all rich sources of carbohydrate, and once cooked this is often rapidly digestible-giving a high glycemic index (sugar spike).

· They are extremely poor sources of vitamins (particularly vitamins A, B-group, folic acid and C), minerals, antioxidants and phytosterols.

Therefore diets high in grains beans and potatoes (GBP):

· Contain toxins in small amounts

· Have a high glycemic index (ie have a similar effect to raw sugar on blood glucose levels)

· Are low in many vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytosterols- ie they are the original "empty calories"

· Have problems caused by the GBP displacing other foods

As grains, beans and potatoes form such a large proportion of the modern diet, you can now understand why it is so common for people to feel they need supplements or that they need to detoxify (ie that they have toxins in their system)- indeed both feelings are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, we don’t necessarily realize which supplements we need, and ironically when people go on detoxification diets they unfortunately often consume even more Neolithic foods (eg soy beans) and therefore more toxins than usual (perhaps they sometimes benefit from a change in toxins).

[Dayman]

As grains, beans and potatoes form such a large proportion of the modern diet, you can now understand why it is so common for people to feel they need supplements or that they need to detoxify (ie that they have toxins in their system)- indeed both feelings are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, we don’t necessarily realize which supplements we need, and ironically when people go on detoxification diets they unfortunately often consume even more Neolithic foods (eg soy beans) and therefore more toxins than usual (perhaps they sometimes benefit from a change in toxins).

That sounds like bs to me. Whole grains are really good for you.

[Simetrical]

Well, one minor point you should remember is that meat needs to be kept to a small minority of your diet. Most of a hunter-gatherer's sustenance came from the gathering, not the hunting.

A more important point to keep in mind is that to correctly simulate the hunter-gatherer experience, you also need to perform strenuous physical activity for ten-plus hours a day (especially if you're male). And you should also intersperse periods of gorging yourself with near-starvation. I think that without that kind of thing, you're probably missing too much of the authentic lifestyle for the diet to be particularly helpful.

[boofhead]

Physical activity is not a problem for me considering my work, however I recall reading somewhere that hunter-gatherers laboured only approx. 3 hours a day on average. They would hunt/gather in the morning, cook up a giant feed and gorge over several hours in the early afternoon.

But as I said in the OP I am just researching this idea, I'm not converted, and even the wiki has some opposing views on the matter.

Genetically, though, I am forced to consider this:

Looked at in another way, 100,000 generations of people were hunter-gatherers, 500 generations have depended on agriculture, and only 10 generations have lived since the start of the industrial age, and only two generations have grown up with highly processed fast foods.

"The problem is that our genes don't know it," Eaton points out. "They are programming us today in much the same way they have been programming humans for at least 40,000 years. Genetically, our bodies now are virtually the same as they were then."

[Simetrical]

Sure, pretty much. What you're not mentioning, though, is that while we haven't necessarily had time to adapt to our food, the converse is false. Since the dawn of the agricultural age, people have grown only food that they found to be worthwhile to grow. One criterion in that evaluation is, of course, nutrition. So it's the food that's adapted to us.

But regardless of that, if you want to get an optimal diet, the thing to do isn't to try to reconstruct what our ancestors ate, it's to carefully measure what seems to work best now. Happily, nutritionists try to do just that, and if you listen to what they say you'll probably end up a lot better nourished than your typical hunter-gatherer. That approach has the advantage of relying on tested fact instead of kind of reasonable assumptions. Even if our bodies are basically adapted to a hunter-gatherer diet, who says we can't do better?

It's also worth observing that regardless of evolution, the physical fact is that there's no difference between one sucrose molecule and another. The actual food you eat is certainly irrelevant: it's what nutritional content it has, i.e., what it's digested to. If the only nutritional content of an apple is so many milliliters of water and so many grams of fructose, there's no gain in eating the apple over measuring out the appropriate quantity of sugar water, or eating some other fruit containing the same stuff but not available to our ancestors. Probably the ideal diet would be a carefully-measured mix of water, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and minerals administered through an IV tube, and adjusted to find the best balance.

[Trax]

Looked at in another way, 100,000 generations of people were hunter-gatherers, 500 generations have depended on agriculture, and only 10 generations have lived since the start of the industrial age, and only two generations have grown up with highly processed fast foods.

"The problem is that our genes don't know it," Eaton points out. "They are programming us today in much the same way they have been programming humans for at least 40,000 years. Genetically, our bodies now are virtually the same as they were then."

hmmm

Genetic evidence shows that human evolution has been speeding up during the past 10,000 years, indicating that humans on different continents are becoming less alike, according to a report by two U professors that was published last month.

Other groups were able to develop a gene that allowed them to digest milk, causing them to evolve faster. Most humans were not able to digest milk after about age 5, but, between 5,000 and8,000 years ago, in an area close to southern Russia, some cattle herders developed the ability to digest milk, Cochran said.

Cochran said that people are now evolving 100 times faster than in the past, and differences in how certain groups metabolize foods like carbohydrates, alcohol and milk are clear.

linky