[...]Paleofantasies of the perfect diet – Marlene Zuk in NYTimes « Neuroanthropology[...]…

[...]Paleofantasies of the perfect diet – Marlene Zuk in NYTimes « Neuroanthropology[...]…

[...]Paleofantasies of the perfect diet – Marlene Zuk in NYTimes « Neuroanthropology[...]…

As I tried to make clear in my piece, I have no beef with the ‘Paleolithic DIET’ — some of it sounds damn sensible to me: cut waaaaay down on simple carbs, get a lot more fruit, nuts, and organic proteins. Makes bloody good sense to me. My beef is with thinking that this is a) what our Paleolithic ancestors ate (that ate a lot of stuff I suspect most Paleolithic dieters wouldn’t touch, b) that we are perfectly adapted to an imagined diet of around 60kya, and c) that are bodies are ‘designed’ to do anything (they aren’t ‘designed’ — that’s Creationist thinking).

Our gut is a weird one, as I try to detail in a recent post on our new site at PLoS blogs on Richard Wrangham’s work. We’re just about the only species that I can think of that has made such a rapid evolutionary shift from a vegetarian primate diet (likely heavily frugivore and insectivore, although not entirely clear) to a distinctive omnivore primate diet. So our gut is not ‘perfectly adapted’ to what we’re putting in our mouths; and it can’t be because the variety of our capacity to process food is what made it possible for our species to spread to such a variety of ecological niches. If we were ‘perfectly adapted’ to life on the East African steppes, we wouldn’t have had such success going everywhere from Siberia to the Pacific Islands to Australia to Northern Europe.

But the key issue of grains is a really interesting one, because humans have really shifted the global environment so that grains (and grasses more generally) are probably more dominant now than any time in our planet’s history (there was a book on the evolutionary history of grass that I’ve wanted to read, but I can’t remember now who the author was). From the point of view of the grass and grain species (if I can say that), they’ve successfully used humans as a reproductive and anti-competitor device to roll back forests, swamps and a whole host of ecosystems to become far more pervasive than they were when our ancestors were foraging.

That is, our niche modification has meant that, even if you wanted to forage, you’d find that human intervention has shifted the terms of the equation. Paleolithic Dieter in 60kya would have still had megafauna and far more variety of large-bodied edible animals, far less grain in the environment, far more old growth forest, etc.

So don’t get me wrong: if you’re advocating a good diet, composed of lots of healthy foods and eschewing heavy dependence on simple carbohydrates, more power to you. If you think you’re able to step through a dietary temporal gate and recreate ‘the’ ancestral diet, to which our ancestors were ‘perfectly adapted,’ then you’re justifying good decisions (and perhaps even good dietics) with bad paleoanthropology.