Dear Nancy,

I could easily point to a definitive published study on how raw milk enzymes help calcium absorption by simply raising my hand to my head, then delicately unravel my demented digits to point directly to my brain where all the studies and proofs you desire lye. You too can possess the answers you seek by doing the same, all you gotta do is think, after all were not baboons who follow the rigid dogma of whatever the alpha monkey tells us to do.

According to what I gather, there must be an enzyme to help calcium get from the bowels of your small intestines through your villi and microvilli and eventually to your liver and blood stream. Now listen to me closely my good bunny thief, when you don't have to spend so much resources making the enzymes to help the absorption other stuff you will have more resources to digest the calcium stuff. Beeeesides,if there is even an obscure chance that raw milk contains some far flung enzyme to lower the rate of energy to catalyze a calcium absorbed reaction, I can guarantee that there is ZERO chance anything else would have it, at least close to Zero. Nature should have made something in milk to help it get digested because babies don't have well developed enzyme capacity and research will only prove me right one day, you can but shouldn't mark my words.

Yeah, I have a real weakness for mustaches!

Jenny

me too

but those abs holy cow ...what was the topic of this thread again? oh yeah calcium or something..sorry

Ok, I see. Lets make up a bunch of stuff and say it applies to me, therefore it must apply to everyone else. That's great! With science like that we truly would still be hunting and gathering.

You're a nice guy, friendly, funny, and all kinds of good things, but the stuff you say about dairy products I'm afraid isn't quite good enough to wear the label of junk science, since there's simply no science to be found. It is wishful thinking.

PALEO PEOPLE DID NOT DRINK DAIRY. That's all. If you want to drink dairy, more power to you. If you even have yourself convinced that it is healthy for you, I have no problem with that. Personally I can live with things in my life that are unpaleo, I don't try to fool myself or anyone else into believing they are paleo. I might argue that they're good additions to a paleo diet because they're healthy or enjoyable but they're not paleo by definition of the fact they weren't something we are evolved to eat over a long period of time.

But please, stop trying to rationalize your beliefs as being paleo. There's no evidence to back it up so therefore your belief is simply faith and wishful thinking, which is what makes a good religion but lousy science.

I am curious how do we know really what exactly paleo people ate/drank? I thought it was basically unknown but there are many theories?

Look at their bones and remains for certain isotopes. For example, you can tell if someone has eaten corn by looking for a particular (I think carbon) isotope that has a certain number of atoms in it. It is peculiar to corn. You can actually tell how much corn someone eats this way. I don't know if it can be applied to other foods, I'm guessing it can be.

You can also look for settlements and look for the skeletal remains of dairy creatures.

They had piles of trash you can sift through for clues as to what they ate (middens heaps).

See what modern hunter and gatherer people eat (before they're tainted by civilization).

I bet Kallyn can answer this question much better than I can.

I don't know what they ate, exactly, but logic tells me this: Hunting and following meat seems to have to have been a priority. Along the way, I believe that Hs&Gs would not have gone hungry if there were edible leaves, nuts, twigs, lizards, and berries along the way. I can imagine, knowing what I know about hunting, that sometimes there is a long wait, or travel; thus it only makes sense that the "gathering" part come into play during those times.

I tend to have a take on diet that goes back throughout primate evolution. We're talking millions of years. The Native Americans, for example, as the Europeans found them, were hunters and gatherers, but this lifestyle is but only a small part of the total evolution. I can imagine primates as opportunist omnivores - that is, eating anything and everything, including insects, scavenging, and.... each other. Catching and milking an animal seems laughable from this perspective.

I bet they did more fishing than hunting though.

amazing I never thought about food this way ..it is kind of making my brain hurt however :P almost like my job here making me think ...

I suppose that was dictated by environment.

Alas I am truly honored.


Fair enough Nancy, I wont claim that dairy products are paleo, but I wont say they aren't either because apples were not eaten in those days yet are considered paleo, I am setting out to challenge this double standard. You have brought up some very interesting points about paleo eating which I will address in an upcoming thread, how should a person nowadays eat in a paleo way and why.

You got most of the important stuff, Nancy. You're right, the bone isotope analysis doesn't apply to just corn. You can use it to determine what percentage of the diet was meat and what percentage was green vegetation, which is particularly useful because you can then compare the isotopes in human bones to those of known carnivores and herbivores. Human remains in general show omnivorousness, but the percentages of the meat/veg isotopes of course vary depending on locale.

Dental remains are really good clues too. Herbivorous animals have very robust jawbones and large flat grinding molars to deal with the large amounts of fibrous material that they eat. Carnivores OTOH have small jaws and smaller, pointed teeth. Also, you can use microscopic analysis to look at wear patterns on the teeth to see how the creature chewed (like up-down {like a carnivore} or side-to-side {like an herbivore}) and also to get an idea of the diet (vegetation wears down teeth more than meat does). Human dentition tends much more towards carnivory than towards herbivory. In fact, it's one of the best markers of the shift to our species - as hominids evolved, the jawbones and teeth kept getting smaller and smaller as more meat was added to the diet. Cooked foods as well - you don't need a big jaw to eat cooked plant food.

You can examine stone tools and their microscopic wear patterns and try to determine what the tool was used on. You can also examine animal remains that have obvious signs of human butchery which (presumably) meant we were eating them.

If you're really lucky you can find coprolites, which are fossilized human excrement (yummm). Some places in the SW in the United States even have non-fossilized coprolites - they are just really really dessicated. Those are the best for examination, but unfortunately they are also the youngest - I think you can't really find any older than about 13k years.

Midden heaps like Nancy mentioned are great. You can find all kinds of goodies like butchered bones, discarded nut shells, etc.

Some sites can be examined microscopically for pollen residue, but whatever you're examining has to be preserved in such a way that it wouldn't have been contaminated by modern pollen. The pollen residues can tell you what plants there were in the area, which again would presumably have been exploited as a natural resource.

You can also examine modern hunter-gatherer tribes to see what kinds of subsistence patterns they have. The environments they live in today are pretty marginal and are probably not what we evolved on, but it's still useful to observe how humans in the wild exploit every natural resource that they can. It makes it much easier to hypothesize about how ancient resources would have been exploited by our ancestors.

That's all I can think of right now but I'm sure there's more. I've been out of the anthro loop for like 2 years now.

Yes, yes. We know the foods we eat are not exactly as they were in paleo times, they've been bred to be sweeter, bigger, etc. Nothing new and startling in that bit of news. But there was food similar to that being eaten back then. Apples didn't materialize out of thin air when people started agriculture, something preceeded it that was probably pretty tasty. Even if humans never existed, fruits would probably evolve to suit someone's taste. For instance, many things need to be eaten to properly propagate and spread the seeds over a wide area. So survival dictates the fruit of that plant needs to appeal to some fruit eater. The fruit eater is going to prefer some plant over others due to spontaneous mutations, so that fruit will get propagated more successfully and will spread more of its genes. Eventually the tastiest fruit gets even tastier.

This is why we have to be careful with fruit and not over consume it, it has a lot more fructose and other sugars as well as starches than it probably ever started out with. The difference here is that dairy products have been around 10,000 years at best (and only in some areas -- other places it is brand new), while some form of the same fruits and vegetables we currently eat have been eaten far longer than that.

There is no evidence that paleo people ever ate dairy products other than the tall tales you dream up.

The paleo diet is a simulation, not an exact replica. Simply because we can never unevolve the plants we eat that have evolved along with us, or because of us. But at least they're close.

Personally, I'm trying to de-evolve to make up for the difference...

I think some of my customers are trying to do the same. Hee hee hee