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#Post#: 598--------------------------------------------------
About the "Paleo diet"
By: agate Date: December 26, 2014, 8:01 pm
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At least one of the diets being recommended by some for MS uses
the "Paleo" diet as its basis. More on the "Paleo diet" here.
From Medical News Today, December 25, 2014:
[quote]What was the 'Paleo diet'? There was far more than one,
study suggests
The Paleolithic diet, or caveman diet, a weight-loss craze in
which people emulate the diet of plants and animals eaten by
early humans during the Stone Age, gives modern calorie-counters
great freedom because those ancestral diets likely differed
substantially over time and space, according to researchers at
Georgia State University and Kent State University.
Their findings are published in The Quarterly Review of Biology.
"Based on evidence that's been gathered over many decades,
there's very little evidence that any early hominids had very
specialized diets or there were specific food categories that
seemed particularly important, with only a few possible
exceptions," said Dr. Ken Sayers, a postdoctoral researcher at
the Language Research Center of Georgia State. "Some earlier
workers had suggested that the diets of bears and pigs--which
have an omnivorous, eclectic feeding strategy that varies
greatly based on local conditions--share much in common with
those of our early ancestors. The data tend to support this
view."
The co-author on the paper, Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy, is a
Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Kent State
University, well known for his reconstructions of the
socioecology and locomotor behavior of early hominids such as
"Ardi" (Ardipithecus ramidus, 4.4 million years old) and "Lucy"
(Australopithecus afarensis, 3.2 million years old).
The study examines anatomical, paleoenvironmental and chemical
evidence, as well as the feeding behavior of living animals.
While early hominids were not great hunters, and their dentition
was not great for exploiting many specific categories of plant
food, they were most likely dietary "jacks-of-all-trades."
The review paper covers earliest hominid evolution, from about 6
to 1.6 million years ago. This touches on the beginning of the
Paleolithic era, which spans from 2.6 million to roughly 10,000
years ago, but Sayers suggests that the conclusions hold in
force for later human evolution as well.
The researchers offer several points that need to be considered
by people wishing to emulate the diets of our ancestors:
1. It's very difficult to characterize the Paleo diet. Advocates
suggest certain types of foods and a percentage of energy that
should come from protein, fats and carbohydrates. These
recommendations are based largely on estimations from a limited
number of modern human hunter-gatherers, but the diet of early
humans was almost certainly much broader.
"I think that you would certainly have lots of variation way
beyond what those recommendations are," Sayers said. "When
you're trying to reconstruct the diet of human ancestors, you
want to look at a number of things, including the habitats they
lived in, the potential foods that were available, how valuable
those various food items would have been in relation to their
energy content and how long it takes to handle a food item."
There's more to dietary reconstruction than looking at teeth
from a chemical perspective or under a microscope. It involves
characterizing the environment and taking into consideration
factors as disparate as locomotion, digestion and cognitive
abilities, Sayers said.
2. Our ancestors lived in a wide range of environments, which
affected the types of food available. The variables important to
feeding decisions would have differed greatly from place to
place and over time, and thus greatly differing "optimal diets"
would have been predicted, as suggested by modern evolutionary
ecology. This is clearly observed today. Hunter-gatherers in a
northern climate may have an almost exclusively animal-based
diet, while hunter-gatherers near the equator might rely heavily
on plant-based resources.
3. Even the "same food" isn't the same today as it was in the
olden days. For example, in an earlier study, Sayers
investigated the diet of langur monkeys living high in the Nepal
Himalaya. At one point in the year, there were wild strawberries
on the ground, which seemed to be an attractive food choice.
However, the monkeys wouldn't eat them. Sayers tasted the wild
strawberries and found they were incredibly bitter.
"The strawberries that we're eating in the market have been
selected for certain properties, such as being large and sweet,"
Sayers said. "The foods that we're eating today, even in the
case of fruits and vegetables, have been selected for desirable
properties and would differ from what our ancestors were
eating."
4. Early humans had shorter life spans, so it's difficult to say
if their diet was "healthier."
"Individuals throughout the vast majority of the Stone Age were
not living that long. Life expectancies are so high today, at
least in many regions of the globe," Sayers said. "A lot of the
diseases that do come about today or have been linked with
high-fat diets or things like that have been referred to by some
researchers as 'diseases of affluence.' They're diseases that
come about simply because we're living long enough that they can
show their effects."
In recent years, controlled studies have compared the Paleo diet
with alternative approaches, and with respect to particular
health issues, nutritionists are largely taking a "wait-and-see"
attitude towards them.
5. Our ancestors were focused on survival, not necessarily
eating a balanced diet. "Throughout the vast majority of our
evolutionary history, balancing the diet was not a big issue,"
Sayers said. "They were simply acquiring enough calories to
survive and reproduce. Everyone would agree that ancestral diets
didn't include Twinkies, but I'm sure our ancestors would have
eaten them if they grew on trees."[/quote]
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