[ExI] The grain controversy (was Paleo/Primal health)

[Dave Sill]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 10:46 PM,  <lists1 at evil-genius.com> wrote:
>
> Here's Dr. Cordain's response to the Mozambique data:
> http://thepaleodiet.blogspot.com/2009/12/dr-cordain-comments-on-new-evidence-of.html
>
> Summary: there is no evidence that the wild sorghum was processed with any
> frequency -- nor, more importantly, that it had been processed in a way that
> would actually give it usable nutritional value (i.e. soaked and cooked, of
> which there is no evidence for the behavior or associated technology
> (cooking vessels, baskets) for at least 75,000 more years).

Nor is there any evidence to the contrary.

> Therefore, it was either being used to make glue -- or it was a temporary
> response to starvation and didn't do them much good anyway.

That's pure SWAG.

I'd like to see the Mozambique find criticized by someone who doesn't
have a stake in the "paleo diet" business.

> As far as the Spartan Diet article, it strongly misrepresents both the
> articles it quotes and the paleo diet.  Let's go through the
> misrepresentations:
>
> 1) As per the linked article, the 30 Kya year old European site has evidence
> that "Palaeolithic Europeans ground down plant roots similar to potatoes..."
>  The fact that Palaeolithic people dug and ate some nonzero quantity of
> *root starches* is not under dispute: the assertion of paleo dieters is that
> *grains* (containing gluten/gliadin) are an agricultural invention.

Granted. However, that's more evidence that paleo diets did include bulk carbs.

> 2) No one disputes the 23 Kya Israel data.  However, there is a big
> difference between "time of first discovery" and "used by the entire
> ancestral human population".

Absolutely. This is just one more data point.

> Note that it takes a *lot* of grain to feed a single person,

So? It doesn't take a *lot* of grain to be a regular part of the diet.

> not to mention
> the problem of storage for nomadic hunter-gatherers during the 11 months per
> year that a grain 'crop' is not harvestable -- so arguing that wild grains
> were the majority of anyone's diet previous to domestication is a stretch.

I'm arguing that we just don't know how big a role grains played. Lack
of evidence isn't evidence that didn't happen. And we now have
evidence that it *did* happen. So now the question is "how much"? I
don't know. You don't know. Nobody knows. Lot's of people are willing
to guess or assert one way or the other, but I'm not.

> And it is silly to claim that meaningful grain storage could somehow occur
> before a culture settled down into permanent villages.

Really? It's silly to think someone could have stashed grain in a cave
for a rainy day? When nearly every other food you eat is perishable,
I'd think that storing grain would be pretty obvious and not terribly
hard to arrange.

> 3) The Spartan Diet page claims that consumption of grains by modern-era
> Native Americans somehow invalidates the paleo diet, by making a strawman
> claim about "The Paleo Diet belief that grain was consumed only as a
> cultivated crop..."  Obviously grain was consumed as a wild food before it
> was cultivated, or no one would have thought to cultivate it!  I addressed
> this already in 2).

I agree.

> Not to mention that humans didn't even *arrive* in the Americas until ~12
> Kya, making this issue irrelevant.

Not really. There's wild rice in China, and nothing the native
Americans did couldn't have been done long before that in Asia.

> 4) The Cordain rebuttal above addresses the Mozambique data, and I won't
> rehash it.

That's a very weak rebuttal, in my opinion.

-Dave