[ExI] Paleo/Primal health [Was: Re: Technology, specialization, and diebacks...Re: I love the world. =)]

[Stefano Vaj]

On 14 November 2010 04:39, Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:
> But I do think it's relevant to apply what we now know when designing
> a diet for modern man. I'm sure lots of paleolithic people ate
> perfectly paleolithic diets that were lacking important nutrients
> because they weren't readily, locally available.

Basically, what we know now is that we have been adapted by Darwinian
selection for a few million years to a specific diet.

The neolithic revolution accepted the inconveniences related to
different nutritional patterns, including a reduction of life
expectancy and innumerable pathologies, in exchange for the ability to
sustain immensely larger population on the same territory, allowing
the division of labor, abandoning nomadism, catering to some extent
for unexpected events, etc.

It is interesting in this context that élites on one side went on with
much more "paleo" dietary styles (fresh animal protheins and some
fresh fruit) than the masses, on the other were the first victims of
the "addictive" properties of the new nutrition (e.g., abuse of
sugars, fermentation products, etc.).

Of course, we still can
a) wait for Darwinian mechanisms to kill all diabete- or obesity- or
cavity-prone human beings;
b) re-engineer our children to thrive on Coca-Cola, pop corns and
candy floss as well as an ant would do;
c) optimise our diet for purposes different from generic Darwinian
fitness (e.g., a life style requiring 6000 calories per day or
intended to help one become a sumo champion or to self-experiment with
hypertension is hardly served  by a strict paleo diet).

Otherwise, the administration of substances for nutritional purposes
which we have not been "designed" to assume is justifiable in
non-purely-economic or recreational terms only when they can be shown
to generate specific, desirable results. Same as drugs.

> And you don't think pre-agricultural people ate grass seed? Where do
> you think they got the desire to cultivate them? Grass seed has been
> found  in dinosaur coprolites.

Cereals, e.g., are not really edible by human beings, let alone modern
human beings, unless treated and cooked, and yet to a rather limited
extent in their wild varieties...

Once again, they were put at use, and "invented" in the first place,
not because we had a physiological "need" for them, but because they
were a real breakthrough in terms of calories produced per square
kilometer.

-- 
Stefano Vaj