Paleolithic Nutrition

Just as it's true that the longer we live the sooner we'll die, it's also true that the longer we live the more likely we are to encounter some modern day, diet-related health problems that didn't worry our paleolithic forebears a whit. Old cro-magnon didn't give a fig about heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, or osteoporosis since he probably wouldn't live long enough for them to catch up with him anyway. The upshot of all this is that we've had precious little nutritional adaptability to show for our two million or so years on the planet and our genetic constitution hasn't changed notably since we first stood on all twos, some 200,000 years ago.

Oh sure, some races (notably Caucasian) have managed to retain intestinal lactase into adulthood so we can handle dairy products but this hardly counts as a genetic evolutionary trend. No, the fact is that, digestively speaking, we haven't come a long way baby, and our bodies are having trouble keeping up with the changes that "progress" has wrought. In short, a return to the diet of Alley Oop and the gang (if you're too young to get this reference, ask your grandparents) would stand us in very good stead. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine stated the same thing except that they are much too dignified to speak of Alley Oop's diet, preferring to term it Paleolithic Nutrition.

A rose by any other name and all that, the point is the further we stray from the dietary habits of our hunter-gatherer forefathers and foremothers, the closer we get to those chronic illnesses of a "civilized" society. But before you start nodding "I thought so", let's have a look at what the average Joe was eating, say, 30,000 years ago. Probably the biggest surprise for most will be that he packed away a heck of a lot more meat than we do today. The meat differed mostly in its fat content, fat making up about 21 percent of his calories compared to the roughly 35 percent fat in the average western diet. Otherwise, Joe's meat was just about the same as ours--same cholesterol content, same amino acid breakdown.

And, believe it or not, our thirty thousand year old cousins weren't into veggies--at least not the way we know them. We're talking pre-agricultural revolution era and ratatouille wasn't a hot item. Wild plants were big on the menu--roots, beans, nuts, tubers and fruits being very common; cereal grains were hardly used at all. It amazes me that anyone ever looked at some wheat and envisioned the bread it could make, never mind Wheaties and Cap'n Crunch.

Cro-Magnon Joe's daily bread, according to the experts, was not bread at all, but looked pretty much like this: wild game (35 percent of the diet was meat), cholesterol (591 mg--amazing what fossils can tell you), sodium (690 mg), fat (21%), calcium (1580 mg--from milking their yaks), ascorbic acid or vitamin C (392 mg), fibre (45.7 grams from wild plants). All of this makes for interesting reading, but so what? Well, how about this: if you are what you eat, maybe you're a Neanderthal. The point that the scientists make is that the human body has been "programmed" for a high fibre intake (no surprise) and a high meat consumption (surprise!)

The paleolithic period on which the researchers focused was from a time when stone tools were first manufactured, to shortly before the development of agriculture. But even during that great time span the vagaries of nature arranged it so that man's diet varied greatly every thousand years or so. Maybe future archeologists will determine that 21st century man was programmed to eat Big Macs and 'shakes.