The Paleolithic Diet, often referred to as the Caveman Diet, is a nutritional plan based upon the presumed hunter-gatherer diet of our paleolithic ancestors. The regimen consists of meats and fish, vegetables and fruits with a decided lack of processed/refined sugars and fats, grains, spuds, alcohol and dairy.The concept here is that man (or human person, if Your Name Is Amanda) is more genetically suited to eat the way he evolved, or something like that...
Much of it makes sense to me, but upon further reading of various articles it appears that too many can not agree in it's application. I don't like complicating the simple, yet I haven't seen mammoths walking around in numbers sufficient to support even a token human population anywhere. Add to that, if everybody alive today hunted, there wouldn't be anything left to eat next year, and we'd be back to farming again, killing ourselves until the next nutrition fad came along to save us.
Short opinion shorter: yeah, whatever...
But I would grant more credibility if so many of the studies were not based upon the energy levels of athletes and marathon runners cause there is no evidence that human Paleolithics engaged in systematic weightlifting or jogged 20 miles just for the fun of it.
18 comments:
"...there is no evidence that human Paleolithics engaged in systematic weightlifting or jogged 20 miles just for the fun of it."
Very true. In fact, the corollary of the Paleolithic diet in the fitness world is "evolutionary fitness" or similar programs that attempt to re-create the physical activity of pre-modern man, which generally includes high-intensity, low-repetition resistance stuff, lots of walking, and intermittent speed work. Stuff that tends to challenge balance and core stability tends to be favored over repetitive, highly controlled motions that isolate specific muscle groups. So, things like swinging a sledge hammer into an airplane tire or using kettle bells is preferred to doing a lot of bench presses on a machine. A couple of very hard 50-100 meter sprints to running for miles. Lots of jumping.
I've been trying to move my routine in that direction. I can definitely see the benefits of high-intensity, low rep weight work...and it's doubly awesome because I spend a lot less total time in the gym (I'm never there more than an hour, sometimes only 30 min.)
As for the diet...I think cutting way back on refined grains and sugar is a good idea, no matter what.
To follow up Bryan's 100% correct assesment, it is also pretty much always a good idea to notch down on the processed corn stuffs too
ha, i didnt know there was a caveman workout regimen as well. makes total sense if you ask me. and anything that is less work has got to be a winner.
This is ludicrous. Our bodies are not the same as they were at one point in our evolution. We need relatively new devices such as salt, refrigeration and curing because our digestive systems are no longer what they were at that time. These Paleolitic peoples were not eating fresh mammal steaks every day. Much of the time, we have every reason to believe that, when it was warm enough for meat to rot, it would do just that. People would eat parasites and insects in their meat without batting an eyelash--just more protein. As our constitutions have evolved with greater sensitivity to pathogens, we may have also acquired the present abilities to synthesize amino acids from non-meat sources.
10,000 years isn't very long in evolutionary time. We're a really young species and we've spent the majority of our time on earth hunting and gathering.
i would imagine paleo-man ate lots of insects, worms and slugs too.
brian, is their an excercise that replicates digging through the dirt with your fingers?
Regarding salt, it's worth noting that meat contains a fair amount of it. You don't taste it per se, but it's essential for electrolyte balance. Salt is necessary for the diet, though, when you go to grains and legumes for your energy and protein.
It's not "evolution," but creatures that are raised on one diet don't have the same reaction to a diet introduced later as creatures raised on the introduced diet.
The most obvious example that comes to mind is how my granny would routinely scrape the green fuzz off of a section of her cottage cheese, wipe off the spoon, get her serving, put the container back and be fine; her children all escaped the food poisoning that took down their children at a family reunion. (They grew up with one of the chores being going out to the wellhouse, scraping the fuzz off of the side of beef and cutting some off for dinner.) My mother in law, who grew up as a sickly child, gets ill if she eats meat is left to thaw for more than two days in the fridge. (thank goodness her son has a cast iron stomach or this would be a much more challenging marriage)
Less elaborately, you get totally different results putting forest-ranged calves on a field of grass than if you put feedlot calves on a field of grass.
Not dietary, but pigs are famous for the huge physical changes you'll see in just one or two generations when they're feral. Go from pink (or oreo, or whatever)piggly-wigglies to dang-near-furry haired boars with a different bodyshape.
(The tusks are a famous indicator, but that's an artificial change-- my mom always snipped them when she lead 4-H. Not sure if there are breeds without tusks.)
All of which is to make the point: even if we could figure out what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate, and recreate the diet in a manner that our modern sensibilities would allow (roadkill and bugs, anyone?), it would still interact with our raised-differently-bodies than it did with theirs.
(I have no idea what the effect of diet on the unborn would be, either-- Kit loves salsa and garlic, both of which I ate by the bucket with her, but her dad loves those things as well.)
I find this stuff fascinating, in case you can't tell.
On reflection, there is a pretty startling example of how quickly changes in diet can change a population: the Pima tribe, which straddles the border between Arizona and Sonora. Those on the American side have been on the reservation since (I think) the early to mid-20th century, and received a lot of subsidized western food: cheese, white flour, etc., etc. Their Mexican counterparts continue to eat their traditional diet based on what can be had from the desert: cactus pads, prickly pear fruit, mesquite flour.
The Mexican Pima are lean and healthy. The Arizona Pima are almost uniformly obese, and have a about a 50% rate of type II diabetes in adulthood. (I used to see them at UMC in Tucson all the time.)
So yes, a lot can happen in 10,000 years.
I'm still pretty sure that sitting in front of a computer and eating a lot of refined carbs is terrible for you.
Brian: that piima story reminds me of a hawaiian lady who changed her family's diet to all traditional hawaiian foods, served the old cooking methods.
eventually, her whole family lost all the excess weight and started looking like those lean ancestors of hers in photogrphy from the late 1800's.
she wrote a book to aid others of her race.
And what was the lifespan of these cave-men?
Also, per Gino's comment about rotting meat, allow me to let you in on a little secret of the meat industry:
Few of us could chew or digest a steak carved off of a just killed cow; the meat is too tough. Steaks have to be "aged" (that is, rotted) to proper tenderness for us to eat it.
Aging is a secret?
Incidentally, according to the dry-aged beef supporters, the less expensive meat hits the grocery store less than a week after slaughter. (I love the warning that you don't age pork....) Had no idea that grocery store beef didn't usually hang-- we eat ranch beef, and the guys who do the slaughtering hang the carcasses so all the butchering can be done in one day. (You learn real quick who puts deer or goats near the beef, too-- yuck!)
There's even a DIY dry aging page or sixty.
That said, there's a WORLD of difference between a clean, drained animal hanging in a dry, refrigerated unit until some can be sliced off for cooking and a predator's leftovers laying in the sun until it's soft enough for humans to eat it raw.
i've never aged my deer. i've asked those who should be in the know, and they've all said 'some people' believe in it, but they themselves have never noticed a difference.
*shrug* Who am I to question people who pay someone to butcher their deer? Too busy being glad they don't take trophies and leave the meat to rot.
The deer my family get are usually butchered on someone's kitchen table, with all mistakes or difficult cuts becoming jerky-- I'd guess yours does the same?
Slight rant:
Yes, people DO sometimes leave the meat to rot. An especially nasty case, some morons in their vehicle shot a deer in our lower field (in the DIRECTION OF A HOUSE), damaged the edge of the road where they pulled over, dragged the deer sideways through the tall alfalfa, got it stuck in the fence, cut half the wires on the fence, tried to cut the head off with some kind of small knife, then tore up the edge of the road some more when something scared them off.
At least once a year my folks come across a headless deer missing a few choice cuts-- some of the "real" hunters will brag about how great it is, too. Don't get me started on the guys too lazy to track down something they wound.
The poachers I have known, on the other hand, kill clean, kill quick, butcher it safely and neatly, and use every bit of meat. They just don't have legal permission to kill the animals in their field....
i follow the rules, mostly. i may take a short cut or two, depending on my motive.
but i use all the meat. i dont waste. it aint right, and why leave meat to be wasted? every lb of meat wasted is another lb i gotta buy at the grocer... so, yeah, meat is money as well as food.
i pay a butcher. wouldnt mind doing it myself if i had the means, and might even be more fun.
Brian's note about the Pima indians reminds me of something I saw when I visited a reservation web site; it was clear that the diabetes clinic was bigger than the clinic for all other maladies. This was for Ojibwe up in NoDak--all over the country, diabetes is a HUGE issue due to Uncle Sam providing 100 lb bags of flour, 100 lb tins of lard, and 100 lb pieces of beef for them to eat.
And it took about 30 years for the problems to be really obvious, not 10,000. :^) Kinda like what happened on the farm when John Deere and Cyrus McCormick took most of the physical toil out of farming. That also took about 30 years....
Post a Comment