Every week there seems to be a new
trend in diet and proper nutrition. This week’s flavor is the paleo diet. Its philosophy
is that we only eat the things that were available to our hunter gatherer
ancestors 10,000 years ago. The main argument for this is that, over millions
of years of evolution our ancestors who were genetically selected to live as
hunter and gathers. Therefore modern day humans should eat as such.
The first assumption of this is that
we have a good idea of what humans ate back then. In reality we don’t really
know. What we know are speculations based on location and what was found with
human remains. This brings up a second excellent point; people from different
parts of the world ate different things. As people and cultures developed so
did the things they ate. People from Asia eat drastically different things as
people from Africa.
The biggest flaw I find with this philosophy
of eating is that it assumes people stopped evolving 10,000 years ago. If this
was the case we would all still be living in caves. As soon as humans developed
the domestication of plants and animal, civilization began. The same logic that
we evolved to be hunter and gathers has to be applied to the genetic changes
caused by the development of modern society. Are the people who are better
suited to live in our society more likely to pass on the genes?
In the end there is no all-inclusive
diet that is perfect for everyone. What we eat should be based on good science
and not on some fantasy about a lost Stone Age paradise.
Curnoe
D. 2014 Nov 30. The Palaeolithic Diet And The Unprovable Links To Our Past IFL
Sceince;. Available from:
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/palaeolithic-diet-and-unprovable-links-our-past
I completely agree with you James. I see the point that the individuals that invented this diet are going for, i.e. the fact that humans were evolved to eat those foods. Additionally we can assume that many of the core metabolic functions in humans today are probably similar to those ancestors. The issue that I run into with the diet is the concept of intelligence. Human are significantly more intelligent in today's world than they were 10,000 years ago. Our technology and machinery is leaps and bounds ahead of what those individuals could have ever imagined. Because of this it makes sense that our diets should grow in intelligence as we do. Because of this a balance diet is what should be recommended to people.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally many basic facets of the paleo diet is eating red meat because that was available to our ancestors back in the day. However there is stacks upon stack of research telling us that we should limit the amount of red meat in our diets because of the effect it will have on our bodies. It will be interesting to see if this diet fad "evolves" unlike the concept.