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

Tue Nov 16 03:46:29 UTC 2010

On 11/15/10 4:23 PM, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote:
> Here are a couple links:
>
> http://thespartandiet.blogspot.com/2010/10/its-official-grains-were-part-of.html
> http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/12/17/tech-archaeology-grain-africa-cave.html
>
> So it obviously happened. It's very hard to tell how widespread it
> was, how important it was, how seasonal it was, what percentage of
> caloric intake it provided, etc. Interestingly, it's still being done
> by the Ojibwe:http://www.bineshiiwildrice.com.

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).

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.

Don't forget that the natural condition of wild creatures is hunger. 
Most of us have never been without food for one single day...or if we 
have, it's been purely by choice.  If you get hungry enough you'll eat 
tree bark.  The real question is: is there evidence that wild sorghum 
was eaten frequently and processed in a way that would make it actually 
digestible and nutritious?  In other words, that there would have been 
significant selection pressure for eating and digesting it?

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.

(Also note that the linked article finishes with a bizarre claim that 
consumption of *any* starch means that a diet is not meat-centered.  As 
I've linked before, hunter-gatherer caloric intake averages about 2/3 
meat and 1/3 non-meat calories.  Apparently there are a lot of people 
who still confuse Atkins with paleo.)

Link to the original paper (full text not available, but supplemental 
material clearly shows that cattail is the 'grains' of starch in question):
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18815.abstract
I've seen this misrepresentation before: articles speak of 'grains of 
starch' found as residue, usually of root vegetables, and anti-paleo 
crusaders mistake this to mean cereal grains, like wheat and barley!

As you might expect, the Spartan Diet page claims explicitly that these 
are cereal grains being processed, even though they're not.  Hmmm...

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".  It took another 11,000 years for people in 
one valley in the Middle East to starve enough to actually start growing 
grains on purpose, and it took thousands more years to spread anywhere 
else.  For instance, Northern Europe only agriculturalized about 5,000 
years ago.

Note that it takes a *lot* of grain to feed a single person, 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.  And it is silly to claim that meaningful 
grain storage could somehow occur before a culture settled down into 
permanent villages.

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).

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

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

I also note that the "Spartan Diet" is a low-fat diet that opposes the 
use of butter and any fat but extra-virgin olive oil -- in other words, 
based on the long-since-discredited theory that fat is bad and saturated 
fats are worse.  It's apparently a gimmick diet based on what they think 
the Spartans ate...which is better than most gimmick diets, but it's not 
based on science.