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To: HartleyMBaldwin

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-true-human-diet/
[I am not a dietician and cannot speak with authority about the nutritional costs and benefits of Paleolithic diets, but I can comment on their evolutionary underpinnings. From the standpoint of paleoecology, the Paleolithic diet is a myth. Food choice is as much about what is available to be eaten as it is about what a species evolved to eat. And just as fruits ripen, leaves flush and flowers bloom predictably at different times of the year, foods available to our ancestors varied over deep time as the world changed around them from warm and wet to cool and dry and back again. Those changes are what drove our evolution.

Even if we could reconstruct the precise nutrient composition of foods eaten by a particular hominin species in the past (and we can’t), the information would be meaningless for planning a menu based on our ancestral diet. Because our world was ever changing, so, too, was the diet of our ancestors. Focusing on a single point in our evolution would be futile. We’re a work in progress. Hominins were spread over space, too, and those living in the forest by the river surely had a different diet from their cousins on the lakeshore or the open savanna.

What was the ancestral human diet? The question itself makes no sense. Consider some of the recent hunter-gatherers who have inspired Paleolithic diet enthusiasts. The Tikigagmiut of the north Alaskan coast lived almost entirely on the protein and fat of marine mammals and fish, whereas the Gwi San in Botswana’s Central Kalahari took something like 70 percent of their calories from carbohydrate-rich, sugary melons and starchy roots. Traditional human foragers managed to earn a living from the larger community of life that surrounded them in a remarkable variety of habitats, from near-polar latitudes to the tropics. Few other mammalian species can make that claim, and there is little doubt that dietary versatility has been key to the success we’ve had.

Many paleoanthropologists today believe that increasing climate fluctuation through the Pleistocene sculpted our ancestors—whether their bodies or their wit, or both—for the dietary flexibility that has become a hallmark of humanity. The basic idea is that our ever changing world winnowed out the pickier eaters among us. Nature has made us a versatile species, which is why we can find something to satiate us on nearly all its myriad biospheric buffet tables. It’s also why we have been able to change the game, transition from forager to farmer, and really begin to consume our planet.]


11 posted on 08/18/2018 11:20:53 AM PDT by Zhang Fei (They can have my pitbull when they pry his cold dead jaws off my ass.)
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To: Zhang Fei

Ahhh...this seems reasonable.


148 posted on 08/18/2018 3:03:47 PM PDT by SE Mom (Screaming Eagle mom)
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