Week 4 Round-Up

It's crazy to me that this blog is old enough to have traditions, so it's with great relish that I am going to break with the "traditional" format of my weekly round-up.

Instead of talking about a bunch of articles from this week (and there were a number of good ones) I want to focus on just one.

Scientific American, which is a real, legit news source in my book (sorry, Shape) ran a story this week in which the author looked at the rules of the Paleo Diet-type diets (also called primal eating, or ancestral) and compared them to what is really known about what people ate in the Paleolithic era.

This could not be more dead-on what this blog is about, so I'm going to devote the whole post to talking about it.

What It Says

Man, sitting at a desk all day is KILLING my glutes.

Although Paleo diets are trendy right now, there's a lot of disagreement in the literature about what people were actually eating during the Paleolithic era. The author touches on several of the different theories about what our ancestors ate and talks about why he thinks one (a plant-based diet) is more physiologically likely than another.

He doesn't dismiss the Paleo Diet as ridiculous out of hand, though. He acknowledges that there's some logic to returning to eating patterns that existed before all the junk in our current lives made us all Jabba the Hutt with a desk job. But in order to do that, you have to figure out what people were actually eating.

Why It's Interesting

Right off the bat, the author defines the Paleo era as as roughly the time period between the invention of the first stone tool and the invention of agriculture, which I find to be a much more helpful way to think about it than telling me it was however many thousand years ago. (According to Wikipedia, from 2.6 million years ago until 10,000 years ago, in case the author's description actually isn't actually more helpful to you).
 

Coco want banana.

He raises a number of great questions, too. For example, when looking at ancestral eating patterns for a model, why pick the Paleo era? If you want to eat in the way that's closest to the way your ancestors ate when your gut ("the most important and least lovely canal on Earth") was still evolving, you should eat like a monkey.

The man knows a lot about monkey poop chutes, but in summary, the modern human digestive system is very similar to that of monkeys, and is designed to process all types of food (plant and animal). He contrasts this with a cow's stomach and intestines, which are specialized with lots of little nubbins called villi to digest large quantities of grass, and a lion's stomach, which is big and smooth and built to digest antelope and whatnot.

So what do monkeys generally eat? Leaves, nuts, fruit, bugs, and the occasional bird, lizard, or other monkey that was really getting on their last nerve.

They are capable of eating anything, really, but in reality, they only get about 3% of their calories from meat. It is a lot easier to catch a banana than a bird, you know? And that 3% is the number for chimps, which are notoriously blood-thirsty. Most monkeys probably eat less meat.

He suggests that it's possible that our bodies have changed in recent history to adapt to eating more than 3% meat, since that's what the Western world, at least, has been doing for quite a long time.

He points to the evolutionary adaptations that have been proven to be the result of adaptation to agriculture- such as increased production of an enzyme to handle starchy foods, or milk products, or, in Japan, seaweed.

These adaptations are regionally specific, so who your recent ancestors are matters a lot in whether or not you'll be lactose intolerant or...seaweedose intolerant. But even so, during all of the recent history where there were regional adaptations to agriculture, people were still eating a lot of plants, fruits and nuts, and so those remained something it was possible for your body to process.

Finally, he talks a bit about the bacteria species that live in your (and everyone's) guts. They are unique to each individual, and may have adapted to adjust to eating more meat than our ancestors- sounds from this article like the jury's still out on that.

Guess who got the short straw?

(How do people end up with these jobs? Why would anyone dedicate their entire life to studying the bacteria in thousands of people's buttholes? They have a PhD- surely they had other options?)

In figuring out what, then, you should eat, he suggests that there's no straightforward answer because we're all made up of multiple layers of differing evolution, both ancient and recent. As he says, "We all appear to be able to live relatively well on our ancient, primate diet, but we don’t live identically on it, because of our different histories, our unique historic relationships with food."

There are some weaknesses to the article- the author says at the end that he is a vegetarian but he doesn't really share why he's made that decision.

Also, he gets pretty hung up on the fact that most monkeys probably get most of their animal protein from bugs, and so in order to truly eat Paleo, you'd have to do the same. But a number of the Paleo bloggers I've read have stressed that the diet is not about historical re-enactment for them. Paleolithic people probably also ate the carcasses they found left by lions, and no one is suggesting anyone do that.

Still, it's an interesting look at how your body's built, and the implications that might have for what you should be eating. If you want to read the article for yourself, it's here.

Happy weekend everyone! Thanks to everyone who's been reading- I really, really appreciate your feedback and encouragement.